U.S. chip companies Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and Qualcomm last week reported first-quarter earnings, and each had drastically different results and outlooks. They’re on divergent paths, attempting to redefine themselves with varying levels and rates of success.

Let’s break them down.

Read:AMD earnings boosted by Ryzen and crypto mining

Of the three earnings announcements, this was the most straightforward. Advanced Micro Devices AMD, -2.09% (AMD) showed significant revenue, profit margin and earnings growth. Revenue rose 40% from a year earlier and 23% from the previous three months. Margins stretched to 36% from 32% in only one year. And AMD swung to a profit of $81 million from a loss of $33 million a year earlier.

The biggest driver of growth came from the Ryzen family of processors, with modest input from the Radeon graphics group and its Vega designs. The Compute and Graphics segment witnessed a 95% year-on-year growth rate — think about that. In the span of just a single year, AMD has nearly doubled revenue from processors and graphics.

The Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom group, responsible for the EPYC family of server processors as well as the custom chip designs found in the Sony SNE, -1.06% PlayStation and Microsoft MSFT, -1.53% Xbox, was down 12%. This is largely due to the falling off of income from the console design wins.

Though the earnings numbers are a good confirmation, it has been easy to see AMD on a sustained upward turn. The execution on its roadmap and product development has brought back customers in a way we haven’t seen for years. That includes both channel customers and the system OEMs like Dell, HP HPQ, +1.41% and Lenovo.

CEO Lisa Su mentioned that Ryzen Mobile would be offered in 25 additional notebooks for consumers and commercial markets in the next two quarters, another sign that partners are confident in the product being provided.

Second-quarter forecasts from AMD claim to see 50% year-on-year growth, and I see no reason why AMD couldn’t beat even that estimate.

Intel — growing pains

Read:Intel just posted a huge quarter, but can the momentum last?

Numerically, the results from Intel INTC, -1.09% were strong in the first quarter. Revenue was up 9%, and net income was up 50% quarterly and 30% year-over-year. All key business segments grew, led by the biggest jumps in the Data Center Group at 24% and the memory group at 20%.

Newer segments grew as well, including the Programmable group that is based largely on the acquisition of Altera. This segment of programmable accelerators, which Intel hopes will create growth opportunities to target the dominance of Nvidia NVDA, -1.22% in many fields, increased revenue by 17% to nearly half a billion dollars. Primary competitor Xilinx XLNX, -1.19% will have a technological battle ahead of it as Altera is augmented by the design and engineering talent that Intel provides.

The Client Computing Group, which makes up about half of the total revenue for Intel, grew modestly at 3%. Considering the in-roads that AMD is making in the same space, and the constant claims that the PC market is dying, growth at all for Intel is a big win for the company.

Overshadowing this growth was the announcement that Intel’s 10 nanometer (nm) process technology was being bumped from 2018 to 2019 for mass volume production. Intel is currently building its fastest processors on one of several iterations of its 14nm technology. Lower process nodes tend to provide benefits for those chips by allowing them to run at higher frequencies and lower voltages.

Process technology is one of the key reasons Intel has led in semiconductors for as long as it has, and this most recent delay is another indicator that Intel may be losing that advantage. I have written many times about the movement other foundries like TSMC and GlobalFoundries are making, closing the gap on Intel, and providing Intel competitors with silicon solutions that allow for better products to be built.

Along with the delay, Intel announced a new initiative to de-couple product design from process technology design in order to give its teams more flexibility to absorb this delay and any future hurdles manufacturing may come across. This means Intel will be combining designs on multi-chip packages, likely from different process nodes, and depend on new interconnects to facilitate performance. This is idea has already been executed by Intel with Kaby Lake-G, its Intel CPU and AMD GPU product.

Along with product shifts, Intel is going all-in on new personnel to drive the company forward. Raja Koduri joined the company to take charge of the compute group, overseeing both the primary processor and graphics architecture designs. Promising to bring Intel into the world currently led by Nvidia, Intel has hired former AMD marketing lead Chris Hook to revitalize the company and prepare it for the pending discrete graphics entry.

Equally as surprising as Koduri, Jim Keller was announced by CEO Brian Krzanich as taking over silicon design at Intel. Keller was most recently at Tesla TSLA, -9.02% working on artificial technology (AI) technology for AutoPilot, but was previously at Apple AAPL, -1.96% and AMD, building processor architectures for both. It is atypical for Intel to reach outside of its own walls for top-level engineering, but Krzanich clearly sees that this company needs to be shaken up.

Intel remains the giant of the tech world, and though it would take years of sustained problems in product and direction to truly be at risk of long-term damage, it needs to prove that it can pivot to address the computing demands of the future. Machine learning, artificial intelligence and graphics are going to be critical areas for markets to watch through 2018.

Qualcomm — licensing its future

Read: Qualcomm’s outlook disappoints investors

Easily the most complex discussion of these three tech giants’ earnings comes from Qualcomm QCOM, -1.08% . Licensing complications and legal battles have been disrupting its ability to properly showcase monetary gains from its technological potential for a while. Even with the Broadcom AVGO, -0.94% battle behind it, there is a lot to watch for.

Qualcomm posted a 5% increase in revenue from a year earlier but a decline of 13% sequentially. Net income was down 52% year-over-year, to $400 million.

The semiconductor technologies group (QCT) was more positive, with total modem chip shipments up to 187 million, a 4% annual increase. The group benefited from tax shifts in the U.S., increased its margins, and began the complex process of lowering operating expenses with some reported layoffs.

The licensing portion of Qualcomm’s business is holding back financials. Its revenue is down 44% year-over-year, owing in large part to Apple and one other unnamed customer (likely Huawei) not paying royalties. Third-quarter guidance shows another drop of 11% sequentially.

As a part of its earnings release, Qualcomm announced a shift in its terms for the licensing group, creating an option to separate “SEP” (standard essential patents) from “non-SEP” (non-essential patents). This division had already existed for Chinese OEMs, but Qualcomm is now rolling it out globally. SEP are required to build a phone and cover the crucial technologies that create 3G, 4G and 5G operability. Non-SEP covers things like power management and camera image processing.

Customers will now be able to choose the option for SEP only (at a lower price), though without the capability to take advantage of all of Qualcomm technological developments or protect themselves from future litigation.

Qualcomm also decreased the limit on royalties by dropping the cap on device selling prices from $500 to $400. This means phone manufacturers like Apple or Samsung SSNLF, would only have to pay that royalty percentage up to $400 of the total phone cost (excluding things like shipping, packaging, taxes) rather than the previous $500.

Knowing that both of those options will reduce peak income for the licensing group, this is clearly a move from Qualcomm to change perception of the program. If Qualcomm can get Apple and other non-paying customers back into the fold, removing the overhead of legal disputes along the way, it will be able to better plan for the future of the company.

Despite being able to push past the Broadcom hostile takeover, Qualcomm still has some challenges ahead of it. Settling the licensing disputes is one of the biggest, but the company also must make hard choices on where it will continue to invest in adjacent markets like health care, servers and PCs.

Qualcomm continues to be the technology driver in mobile and has leadership in areas of silicon design, but it must cement the area of licensing to prove that it can, and will, grow everywhere else.

Ryan Shrout is the founder and lead analyst at Shrout Research, and the owner of PC Perspective. Follow him on Twitter @ryanshrout.