Intel isn't the only chipmaker to have a record first quarter—AMD's Q1 revenue of $1.57 billion set a first-quarter record for the company. Like Intel, AMD saw a huge boost in year-over-year processor shipments, and an average sales price jump as well. But the CPU unit's 23 percent year-over-year jump was nothing compared to the GPU division's 88 percent year-over-year increase. Average sales prices jumped as well, as did shipments of mobile GPUs. Clearly, it's good to have the top GPU on the block.

In addition to the general PC market rebound and the strength of its smaller, more focused product mix, AMD also benefited from the fact that this was the company's first quarter to fully reflect the deconsolidation of the Globalfoundries spinoff, and it's the first full quarter after the chipmaker's settlement with Intel. Free from its fab burden, its legal battles, and the effects of some of the practices that Intel agreed not to engage in, the company looks to have turned itself around, at least initially.

It remains to be seen how far AMD's Fusion strategy will take it—this is partly because certain elements of the strategy are unclear, and partly because some of the elements that are clear are new and risky enough that they may not work. The company's upcoming high-end Bulldozer core is a departure from anything else that's out there, and its Llano mobile part is a bit of a gamble that this level of GPU/CPU integration at this early of a stage will really pay off. Still, if the IT rebound holds together, things look better now for AMD than they have in quite a few years.