Last week’s Intel earnings suggested the tide had turned, and AMD’s Q4 and FY23 agree: PC sales are getting back to where they should be.
It was a crummy year for Ryzen CPUs, losing $46M on 25 percent lower revenue, but things changed last quarter: AMD chips sold 62 percent better YoY for $55M in operating profit. Radeon GPU sales were up too.
Meanwhile, Microsoft saw “PC market unit volumes were at roughly pre-pandemic levels.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Nintendo’s just quietly waiting to pull a Twilight Princess, like Mike McWhertor suggests at Polygon?
Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on both its ailing GameCube and the brand-new Wii. A little over a decade later, it did something similar, releasing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on both Wii U and Nintendo Switch.
Because it’s been five years since Nintendo rebooted development on Metroid, let alone announced the game — and those Switch 2 rumors are heating up.
[Polygon]
I’m actually working on a review of the Legion Go right now, and it’s the only Windows gaming handheld I can recommend — if you absolutely must have Windows, can’t wait for Intel-powered handheld reviews, and don’t want a gaming laptop instead.
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Asus India exec Arnold Su told Techlusive that the new gaming handheld will “focus more on gaming” — what a Yo Dawg quote! — but will still be focused on Windows rather than, say, SteamOS. I wonder why.
The first Ally was a bit tortured but not a bad product overall, unless we’re talking about the cheaper, weaker version.
AMD is axing the stream-and-monitor-your-own-PC-games feature, and its announcement made me laugh:
For users that game remotely with AMD Link, one important announcement is that AMD is ending support for the AMD Link software application
No kidding! Did you use it? I preferred the hardware-agnostic Steam Link, but there’s also Moonlight and Parsec. Nvidia also axed its similar GameStream feature in 2022.
We told Framework we had several different stability issues, so I was a little frustrated to see the company’s CEO suggest I only encountered one... but I’m happy to say Framework will send The Verge a final production unit with quite a list of hardware and software fixes!
The DPC_Watchdog_Violation freeze, at least, does seem to be fixed in my testing with a newer BIOS.
[u/cmonkey (Reddit)]
Not only did Intel’s consumer chips see 33 percent gains ($8.8B revenue), the CFO said on today’s earning call that “customer inventory levels have normalized” and Intel saw “record performance notebook shipments in the quarter.”
While PCs were down in 2023 overall, they got close to pre-pandemic numbers of 260-270M shipments globally, and Intel’s bullish on AI upgrades.
Intel says it hit its goal of $3B in cost-cutting in 2023, and made $2.66B in profit in Q4 (up from $796M loss this time last year).
