PCs, Though ‘Volatile at Times,’ Are ‘Important Market’ for AMD, Says CEO

At Advanced Micro Devices, “we really like PCs,” CEO Lisa Su told the company’s analyst day conference Tuesday. “We think PCs are an important market for us. It's a high-volume market. It's one of the few markets where you really ship over 250 million units a year, and although it has been volatile at times, it is actually the way many of us connect as both consumers and commercial applications to the cloud into the rest of the infrastructure.” AMD sees “sub-segments” within the PC market that are “very profitable and growing, and so those are some of the areas that we're going to focus within PCs,” Su said. Immersive devices for virtual and augmented reality and other implementations is “a very exciting area” for AMD, she said. “There is a constant demand for more pixels on every screen, whether you're talking about game consoles, or embedded devices, or high-end graphics cards. The idea is you can always make it more beautiful, you can always make it more realistic, and you can always have more resolution.” The company sees the market for immersive devices increasing at a 7 percent compound annual growth rate through 2020, Su said. “There are certain segments of this market that we think will grow well into the double digits.” Those include “high-end gaming, as well as VR and AR, and some of those applications,” she said.