"In 2027, we are planning for PC market unit shipments to decline by a double-digit percentage," Su said. "In this environment, we expect to outperform the market as we deliver our rising roadmap and grow our commercial footprint."
AMD projects its Client and Gaming business to contract by more than 20% sequentially in Q4 2026 as higher memory prices weaken PC demand. The company is also preparing for a double-digit decline in PC shipments in 2027, although it expects to outperform the market by concentrating on enterprise, premium consumer, and desktop processors. Unfortunately, AMD did not provide a specific revenue forecast for its Client and Gaming segment for 2027.
As for AMD's Embedded business, it also demonstrated strong growth as its revenue increased by 29% year-over-year to $1.11 billion and operating income rose by 60% to $453 million. The company attributed the improvement to stronger demand from aerospace and defense, automotive, communications, and industrial customers.
AMD expects its Embedded business to grow by double digits sequentially in Q4 2026, then experience double-digit annual revenue growth over the next several years.
"Data center build-outs are also driving higher demand for our embedded CPUs and adaptive SoCs in control plane and optical networking applications," said the head of AMD. "We remain on track to close more than eighteen billion of design wins in 2026, our third consecutive record year."
For those of our readers who have been following the CPU market in general as well as AMD and Intel in particular for decades, arguably the most earth-shattering part of AMD's earnings report is its outlook for the fourth quarter. The company expects revenue of approximately $17 billion, plus or minus 3%, which implies a 66% year-over-year increase and 27% sequential growth at the midpoint.
In contrast, Intel expects fourth-quarter revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion amid weakening PC demand and manufacturing capacity constraints.
If AMD meets its guidance, its quarterly sales will surpass those of its considerably bigger rival Intel for the first time in history. In fact, AMD will not only leave Intel formally behond, but its projected advantage will be approximately $1.5 billion at the midpoint of both companies' forecasts, which is a tangible lead.
The development reflects the companies' increasingly different positions on the market: AMD is rapidly expanding its data center CPU and AI accelerator businesses, while Intel continues to depend heavily on PC and enterprise server processors, which sales face headwinds due to high memory prices and components shortages.
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Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
me-three Admin said: As increasing sales of data center hardware more than offset declines in the client realms, AMD's profitability continues to improve. Perhaps the most striking announcement AMD made is that it expects its Q4 revenue to reach approximately $17 billion, which would put it ahead of Intel for the first time in history. Data center business now accounts for 64% of AMD's revenue Whoa, hard facts of reality in a TH piece. Reply
TechieTwo Congrats to AMD for offering top shelf products to the marketplace, (y) Reply
me-three TechieTwo said: Congrats to AMD for offering top shelf products to the marketplace, (y) Yes, totally! More top-shelf AI products! Less menial PC products that nets you pennies! Doubly so for Intel! Know where the money is, and don't waste time with the piddly stuff! You're in last place, need to catch up! Reply
cknobman All this "profit" is just circular spending from big tech and one big scam. Its all going to come crashing down soon enough. Reply
atomicWAR Nice to see AMD making history for itself. I am glad Intel has serious competition. Anytime one CPU maker dominates to much it's never good for the market as a whole. So with that said I'd like to see Intel up there game some so we don't find ourselves back in the Core (1st-6th gen) era but with AMD only dropping marginal gains of 5-10% gen on gen. Now if the AI bubble could pop and make kit affordable by the time Zen 6/7 hit the market we'll be set… Reply
rm12 atomicWAR said: Nice to see AMD making history for itself. I am glad Intel has serious competition. Anytime one CPU maker dominates to much it's never good for the market as a whole. So with that said I'd like to see Intel up there game some so we don't find ourselves back in the Core (1st-6th gen) era but with AMD only dropping marginal gains of 5-10% gen on gen. Now if the AI bubble could pop and make kit affordable by the time Zen 6/7 hit the market we'll be set… Intel was mostly the only game in town, and they bear until today the culture they created because they could. x86 is not the only game in town, ARM competition is real, and is a reason to keep on improving. Reply
Lieutenant Barclay cknobman said: All this "profit" is just circular spending from big tech and one big scam. Its all going to come crashing down soon enough. They're not even reporting "profit", just "revenue". And no one calls them out on it. No one is like *raises hand* "excuse me…how much of that revenue is actual profit? " Then we're gonna do a softball interview with a CEO, then cut to a commercial break sponsored by The Prediction Markets 🤮 Reply
TheWerewolf I'm not surprised. Intel decided to chase after Apple when Apple dropped Intel for their own ARM chips and never really recovered. While they were obsessed with making new CPUs that looked more like ARM, they quietly dropped the ball on AI and NPUs and with gamers and workstations. Meanwhile AMD went after actual PC owners with lower price and higher performance CPUs and a gaming focus – meaning lots of P cores regardless of the power curve, while also finding ways to get power down for laptops and lower end PCs. Now watch them sneak in and eat Nvidia's lunch in consumer GPUs. AMD was always a distant second to Nvidia in GPUs – but now that Nvidia has again decided consumers don't matter, AMD has started to reverse its slow drift away from GPUs and are even starting to bring their drivers up to snuff by supporting specific games. Reply
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