Thank you, Laura, and good afternoon to all of those listening in today.
First quarter revenue increased 18% from a year ago to $984 million based on growth across both of our business segments. Gross margin also improved, driven largely by the success of our recently launched Ryzen CPUs. I am pleased with our first quarter product execution and improved year-over-year financial results, which demonstrate the revenue growth and gross margin expansion potential with our strong set of new products. Looking at our Computing and Graphics segment. We delivered our fourth straight quarter of double-digit percentage year-on-year revenue growth.
Strong demand for Ryzen CPUs and improved GPU sales resulted in CG revenue increasing 29% from the year-ago period. CG revenue declined 1% sequentially, which was better-than-normal seasonality as significant growth in desktop processor sales, driven by the first month of Ryzen CPU sales, largely offset seasonal declines in GPU and notebook APU sales. Solid demand for our family of premium Ryzen 7 processors, including our flagship Ryzen 7 1800X offering, which is the industry's highest performance 8-core CPU, drove our highest desktop processor revenue in more than 2 years.
Ryzen CPUs have been consistently ranked among the top-selling processors at global e-tailers and retailers. And press reviews and end-user sentiment have highlighted the strong performance and value proposition. In early April, we launched our enthusiast-class Ryzen 5 processors and received overwhelmingly positive reviews that demonstrate our multi-threaded leadership and unmatched value proposition. The Ryzen CPU partner ecosystem also continues to strengthen. We have seated more than 300 software developers to support their work optimizing for Ryzen CPUs and have already seen double-digit performance gains across a number of top-tier gaming titles.
Last week, the first Ryzen-based OEM gaming desktops were announced, and we continue the rapid rollout of Ryzen-powered systems with additional launches planned for major OEMs later this quarter. In Graphics, GPU sales increased by a strong double-digit percentage from a year ago based on growth across all of our product lines. The ramp of Polaris-based notebook design wins drove increased mobile GPU sales while our desktop growth was led by improved channel sales. In early Q2, we launched 4 new Radeon RX 500 GPUs, featuring our Polaris architecture that deliver improved performance. These new mainstream GPUs provide a compelling solution for the millions of gamers looking to upgrade their PCs to support advanced display technologies and deliver optimal gaming experiences. We also saw higher professional graphics revenue from a year ago, driven by expanding channel sales and growing data center wins, as we continue to increase our GPU-compute footprint with leading cloud service providers. We remain on track to launch the first products from our next-generation Radeon Vega family later this quarter. Vega is a forward-looking architecture that combines a revolutionary memory subsystem, next-generation compute engine, advanced pixel engine and new geometry pipeline to dramatically improve performance and energy efficiency for the next generation of GPU workloads. Customer excitement is building as we focus on bringing significant competition to the high-end GPU space across the PC gaming, professional design and GPU compute markets.
Turning to our Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment, revenue increased 5% from a year ago, driven by the latest game console offerings from Sony and Microsoft and our third straight quarter delivering year-on-year embedded revenue growth. We see solid demand for our latest FinFET-based semi-custom offerings in 2017, including the planned holiday launch of Microsoft's 4K-focused Project Scorpio console featuring a new AMD SoC.
On the data center front, in March, we demonstrated that our upcoming Naples server CPU would offer more cores, I/O and memory bandwidth when compared to the highest-end dual socket x86 server CPUs currently available, resulting in better performance across multiple workloads. Naples platform development work continued to accelerate in the quarter. We are in the final stages of preparation in advance of launch and are very pleased with the status of our silicon and customer engagements. We have now seated thousands of Naples processors across an extensive set of OEMs, end users and partners, and remain on track for our first Naples products to launch this quarter.
In closing, we started 2017 delivering significant year-on-year revenue growth and margin expansion based on solid product execution and strong market and customer reception to our new leadership products. Our focus in 2017 remains on launching our Naples server CPU with broad customer, partner and ecosystem support. Naples is the first step in our long-term plan to deliver a leadership data center product road map. Complementing the success of our mainstream Polaris-based GPUs with our high-end Vega GPUs, extending our Zen core into the mainstream desktop and premium notebook markets with the launches of our Ryzen 3 CPUs and Ryzen mobile APUs in the second half of the year, and expanding our participation in the fast-growing market for GPU compute with the launch of Radeon Instinct accelerators midyear. 2017 is an important year for AMD, and we are well positioned for solid revenue growth and margin expansion based on bringing performance, choice and innovation to an expanding set of markets. I look forward to discussing more about our long-term strategy at our Financial Analyst Day later this month. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Devinder to provide some additional color on our first quarter financial performance.