Chip manfacuturer AMD’s financial results for Q4 2013 are in and they’re looking a lot more impressive than they did a year ago. In the fourth quarter of 2012, AMD posted a $422 million loss on revenues of $1.15 billion. Move forward to today and the company has turned an $89 million profit on revenues of around $1.6 billion.

Why? It’s because AMD’s current business plan seems to read something like this:

1 – Sell chips to Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony
2 – ???
3 – Profit

For the second quarter running, AMD has been profitable and – like Q3 2013 – sales to the three major console manufacturers are being credited with the turnaround. The section of the company which is responsible for GPUs and gaming chips in general, like the custom solutions found in the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (and the GPU in the Wii U), generated revenues of $865 million. Of that, $121 million was profit for AMD.

In contrast, AMD’s CPU arm didn’t perform quite as well. Revenues of $772 million saw a loss of $7 million for the division but that’s still better than last year’s dismal performance. For the year, AMD still posted a loss of $74 million on revenues of $5.3 billion but that’s a much improved total compared to 2012. All thanks to game consoles.

Source: Ars Technica