AMD parts with profits in Q2
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Must improve AMD suffered from the same desktop chip syndrome as rival Intel during its second quarter, as the company handed in another loss.â¦
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The world's No. 2 microprocessor maker, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said it won't return to profitability until the second half of next year and delayed the full release of the product it says will enable its recovery.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has begun shipping commercial versions of its Athlon 64 processors made using a 90-nanometer process, marking another step forward in the company's transition to the more advanced manufacturing technology.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will miss its revenue goal for the first quarter of 2007 because the chip maker grew so fast that it couldn't keep up with demand from its customers, company CEO Hector Ruiz said Monday. The company is unlikely to meet its estimated revenue target of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion for the quarter, the company said. For the same period last year, AMD brought in $1.33 billion, or $780 million excluding revenue from its Spansion memory products unit, which AMD spun off in an IPO (initial public offering) in December 2005. Although the company has gained market share for 10 consecutive quarters -- principally from rival Intel -- that trend is both good news and bad news, Ruiz told an audience of financial investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. "We went from being a player whose majority of sales were in the distribution channel as opposed to OEMs, to one that has changed in a very short time to having a majority of sales going to OEM buyers," he said in a reference to original equipment manufacturers. That transition happened probably faster than we had planned. A larger number of OEMs wanted our products faster than we were prepared to meet, so we were not able to feed the channel." Despite AMD's success in gaining market share, even Ruiz admitted that it may be too late to retain some disgruntled customers. "A channel partner needs a commitment for a 30- to 60-day supply of products. I couldn't give it to them, so they decided to get it somewhere else. We let down our channel partners by not being able to support them as much as they needed us. We need to get our distribution business back on track." Ruiz was contrite about the "glitch," but promised the company would quickly spring back by increasing production, particularly of its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron chip due out in the second half of 2007. The chip will compete against Intel's "Clovertown" quad-core Xeon chip, which launched at the end of 2006. AMD has been aggressive in boosting its market share in the processor industry to nearly 25 percent and by acquiring graphics chip maker ATI in 2006. But investors have begun to grow wary since the company has not yet been able to turn those moves into profits. AMD posted a loss of $574 million in its fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, 2006.
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Semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) warned on Monday that its quarterly revenue will be lower than forecast, citing softness in
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Blog: The past year was rough, but Intel's back to giving Wall Street what it wants: solid gains in both revenue and profits.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Thursday reported lower revenues than in the previous quarter, although profits climbed on increased 64-bit sales into the server market.
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(InfoWorld) - As price competition takes its toll, AMD Thursday posted its third consecutive quarterly loss, saying that although revenue was relatively solid, it suffered a sharp second-quarter drop in income. Revenue for the quarter was $1.38 billion, an improvement from $1.22 billion a year earlier. But the company reported a net loss of $600 million, or a loss of $1.09 per share, a big drop from net income of $89 million, or $0.18 per share, a year earlier. A big part of the loss was due to restructuring costs and a $130 million, or $0.24 per share, charge related toÂ the acquisition of graphics-chip maker ATI last year. One piece of good news was that in the face of stiff price competition from Intel, AMD said its second quarter gross margin was 34 percent, excluding one-time charges, an improvement over its 31 percent margin in the first quarter of 2007. "We achieved a 12 percent sequential revenue increase, improved the gross margin, and won back microprocessor unit and revenue market share," said Robert J. Rivet, AMD's CFO, in a statement accompanying the company results. Looking ahead, AMD forecast that third-quarter revenue would increase in line with traditional seasonal growth rates. Though that does not point to a big increase in profit in the near future, traders reacted positively to the upbeat news on revenue and margins, driving up company shares by $0.32 to $15.78 in after-hours trading. Nevertheless, the second-quarter gross margin, for example, was still a far cry from AMD's 57 percent gross margin in the second quarter of 2006. Rivet acknowledged that to instill confidence in the company, "we must improve our financial results." AMD faces an uphill battle. After gaining ground, in terms of market share and technology, on Intel two years ago by coming out with dual-core processors, AMD suffered last year as Intel battled back with its own line of multicore chips. In the longer term, AMD is pinning its hopes to a great degree on its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip, due out in August. That chip will compete with Intel's dual-core "Woodcrest" and quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon processors launched last year. AMD also needs to stay on track and hit its 2009 goal to bring its new Fusion chip -- made with ATI technology -- to market.
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It was a quarter where AMD shipped more product than ever in its history, with 68% more mobile processors headed for trucking than at this time last year, and graphics processors adding substantially to that mix. It regained a full eight points of gross margin over the prior quarter, and reaped 22.9% greater revenue over the third quarter of 2006. And yet it still posted a loss. What's going on?
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As this year comes to a close, AMD executives won&#39;t be sorry to put 2007 behind them. Battered by rising debt, shrinking market share and mounting financial losses, AMD is counting on a comeback in 2008. But can the struggling chip maker make good on its promises to customers and investors that better times lie ahead?Many of AMD&#39;s current troubles are tied to Barcelona, the first version of its Quad-Core Opteron processor.&#160;Repeated delays of this chip weakened AMD&#39;s finances and undermined confidence in the company&#39;s ability to deliver new products as promised. Rebuilding that lost confidence among corporate users and the financial community won&#39;t be easy and the company can ill afford further missteps.Over the next six months, there are several milestones that AMD must hit in order to get back on track. The first, and arguably most important, involves volume shipments of Barcelona, scheduled to happen during the first quarter. AMD desperately needs this chip to shore up flagging revenue from its commercial business and to take back ground lost recently to Intel in the server market.With a bug that was recently discovered in Barcelona fixed, AMD expects the latest version of the chip to start coming out of its manufacturing plants in January. Barcelona shipments are expected to rise throughout the first quarter, reaching &quot;full volumes&quot; and widespread availability of servers based on the chip during the second quarter, according to Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman.Another early milestone to look out for involves Shanghai, the second version of the Quad-Core Opteron chip that&#39;s set for volume production during the second half of 2008. AMD will produce Shanghai with a 45-nanometer manufacturing process that is one generation ahead of the 65-nanometer process used to make Barcelona.The numbers used to describe chip manufacturing processes refer to the average size of the smallest features that can be created on a chip. The smaller these features can be made, the better. Making these features smaller gives chip makers the ability to shrink the overall size of a chip, thereby reducing unit manufacturing costs, or to add new features. Chips made using a more advanced process may also consume less power and run faster than other versions. But semiconductor production is as much art as it is science, and moving to a more advanced process is fraught with risks.In the case of Shanghai, AMD will take advantage of the 45-nanometer process to triple the size of the Level 3 (L3) cache, from 2M bytes in Barcelona to 6M bytes. The L3 cache is a shared pool of memory that can be accessed by all four cores on the chip. Each core has 512K bytes of Level 2 (L2) cache. When data is moved out of the L2 cache, it moves into the L3 cache instead of main memory, meaning that the core can access this information more quickly than would otherwise be possible.Like AMD&#39;s existing server lineup, Barcelona and Shanghai also include an on-chip memory controller that further helps to increase performance.The memory structure used in the Quad-Core Opteron is different from Intel&#39;s server chips, which do not use an L3 cache and do not have an on-chip memory controller. Instead, Intel&#39;s quad-core Xeon 7300 server chips have 8M bytes of shared L2 cache. Since Intel processors actually pack two dual-core chips inside a single package, the L2 cache is divided into two parts, with 4M bytes on each silicon chip. Intel&#39;s processors do not use an on-chip memory controller.Boosting the Quad-Core Opteron&#39;s L3 cache with Shanghai should give AMD&#39;s quad-core chips the opportunity to stretch their legs, but the company has to make them first. The first working samples of Shanghai are due out of AMD&#39;s factory in Dresden, Germany, in January, according to recent remarks by Mario Rivas, executive vice president of AMD&#39;s Computing Products Group. If these samples arrive late or suffer from unexpected technical problems, this could delay volume production of Shanghai to late 2008 or even early 2009. Conversely, working samples that arrive on schedule and meet or exceed expectations would give AMD an added boost.Besides the server segment, there are a couple of key product milestones on AMD&#39;s roadmap for desktop and mobile processors that bear watching as well.For example, the company plans a first-quarter rollout of Perseus, a package of chips aimed at PCs for the corporate market and centered on a quad-core or triple-core processor and an RS780 or SB700 chipset. A dual-core version will also be rolled out. During the second quarter, AMD plans to roll out Puma, a chip package designed for notebooks. Puma is based on a new processor, called Griffin, expected to offer better performance and power efficiency than AMD&#39;s existing line of mobile processors.AMD plans to offer additional details of its plans and upcoming products at the Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas during January, Hughes said.
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Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.  on Tuesday reported a quarterly loss from a year-earlier profit following a reduced forecast it gave last week.
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Computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Thursday posted a third-quarter profit compared with a loss a year earlier and predicted a fourth-quarter pickup in sales.
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AMD has delayed general availability of some key products until early next year, when it projects the chips, along with other new processors, will return it to profitability.
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What will the future hold for AMD?
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Fifteen percent, then 15.5 percent, and now 15.8 percent. AMD is gaining back lost ground, Mercury Research says.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has pumped up the performance of its Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor and cooled down two single-core Athlon 64 processors. The top-of-the-range AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor is now the 6000+, with a clock speed of 3GHz and 2MB of L2 cache. It sells for $464 in quantities of 1,000 or more. The previous fastest model, the 5600+ with a clock speed of 2.8GHz, now sells for $326 in quantities of 1,000 or more. With its high-performance dual-core systems, AMD hopes to profit from the introduction of Microsoft's new operating system Windows Vista, which places greater demands on computing hardware. There's no speed boost for the single-core Athlon 64 processor, but AMD is now manufacturing the 3500+ and 3800+ models using a 65-nanometer production process, reducing the chips' die-size and energy consumption while offering the same computing performance. The latest versions consume 45 watts, compared to 62 watts for the previous generation, in which the smallest features etched on the chips had a spacing of 90nm. The 3500+ sells for $88 in quantities of 1,000 or more, and the 3800+ for $93. The faster dual-core chips will appeal primarily to gaming enthusiasts, and will appear shortly in PCs from Alienware and Voodoo, the gaming PC divisions of Dell and Hewlett-Packard, respectively, said AMD. Fujitsu Siemens Computers (Holding) will use the lower-power processors in its Esprimo enterprise desktop range, which it promotes as an energy-efficient range, the company said. Two weeks ago, AMDÂ introduced new dual-core Opteron processorsÂ for servers that are either faster or consume less power than previous chips. While AMD had begun to pull ahead in the market for low-power server and desktop chips, IntelÂ is fighting back. Last month,Â Intel persuaded Sun MicrosystemsÂ to use its Xeon processors in future servers and workstations based on the x86 architecture. Sun had only used AMD chips in those machines in recent years, and will now use chips from both manufacturers. At the top of the scale, Intel took the lead in the market for quad-core server chips last November, with the launch of its Xeon 5300 series, previously known as Clovertown. AMD won't introduce its range of energy-efficient quad-core server processors, code-named Barcelona, until the middle of this year.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. reported a third-quarter profit from a loss a year-earlier on today, but sales fell from the second quarter in line with the chip maker&#39;s recently reduced outlook.