People are understandably buying fewer PCs as RAM prices become ever more absurd, and AMD CEO Lisa Su has revealed the extent of the damage expected to be wrought in 2027. In AMD’s Q326 (third quarter of 2026) earnings call, Su said the company is “planning for PC market unit shipments to decline by a double-digit percentage.”
The reason for these declining sales will come as no surprise to anyone who’s had half an eye on PC costs over the last year. “PC sell-through slowed late in the quarter as higher memory and component costs weighed on demand,” explained Su. However, the company still has a positive outlook here. Sales might be down, but Su confidently says she expects AMD “to outperform the market as we deliver our Ryzen roadmap.”
That roadmap is widely rumoured to feature the company’s first Zen 6 desktop Ryzen CPUs, after the architecture launched on Epyc earlier this year. The new chips are expected to bring up to 12 cores on a single CCD, paving the way for 24-core CPUs, while enabling the company to make a pure 12-core X3D CPU.
Su also claimed that revenue in AMD’s Gaming division was down by 40% year on year, which she says is “primarily due to lower semi-custom sales,” as PS5 and Xbox Series console sales slump at this stage of their lifecycles. Su does say that “Radeon GPU channel sell-through increased sequentially,” during the same period, however.
Outside of gaming, it’s no surprise to see that business is booming for AMD’s GPU tech. “Beyond gaming, Radeon AI PRO revenue grew significantly from the prior quarter,” claims Su, “as more developers choose AMD to run and fine-tune models locally.”
Indeed, despite falling PC shipments, AMD is clearly benefitting massively from the AI boom. Su points to a massive 45% increase in year-on-year revenue, with earnings per share climbing by 74%. “The third quarter was the largest and most profitable in our history,” says Su, “as we began ramping our next-generation data centre products.”
Still, it’s a decidedly rubbish time for anyone wanting to upgrade their gaming PC to the latest tech, and that doesn’t look as though it’s going to change in 2027.
