AMD saw revenues in the second quarter grow 40 percent over last year, thanks to strong growth in the mobile PC chip business. AMD's graphics business also did well, though AMD officials expressed frustration with the server numbers.
Advanced Micro Devices followed rival Intel's announcement of record
second-quarter financial numbers with strong results of its own, though its
high revenues were tempered by a net loss of $43 million.
AMD officials announced
second-quarter revenues of $1.65 billion, up 40 percent from the same period in
2009, driven in large part by strong sales of mobile products.
The chip maker also is seeing increasing gains through its ATI
graphics business, which saw revenues jump 87 percent over the same three months
last year.
In a conference call with analysts and journalists July 15, CEO
Dirk Meyer touted the results from AMD's ATI
business, saying the only drawback was that AMD
had trouble keeping up with demand, a situation he said will be corrected over
the next few quarters.
Despite the solid revenue numbers, AMD
took a $120 million charge
related
to Globalfoundries, the company it helped create by spinning off its
manufacturing business last year in a joint venture with Advanced Technology
Investment Co., of Abu Dhabi.
Excluding that charge, AMD showed a net
income of $83 million, according to officials.
Meyer said the mobile PC products were a key driver for AMD's
Computing Solutions business in the quarter. Sony was the latest OEM to adopt AMD
processors for its PCs, joining the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell,
Toshiba and Lenovo.
During the call, Meyer said the company thought the PC business
would see unit growth of 10 to 15 percent. Instead, the growth hit 15 to 20
percent, and the company continued to grow its share of the mobile PC chip
market.
However, AMD officials were
disappointed in the server business, noting that OEM adoption of its
Opteron
6000 series "Magny-Cours" chips, which AMD
introduced in March, was slow.
That was in contrast to Intel's report from July 13. Intel
officials said server chip sales continue to climb, aided by the anticipated
return of corporate IT spending.
"Intel ... knocked the ball out of the park," Meyer
said.
Despite the frustrating server numbers, he and other AMD
officials said they expect improvements in the third quarter, as OEMs not only
increase their adoption of the eight- to 12-core Opteron 6000 chips, but also
the
Opteron
4000 series, which was introduced in June.
The 4000 series, code-named "Lisbon,"
is aimed at the burgeoning scale-out and cloud computing environments.
During the conference call, Meyer also said that AMD
is changing its plans for releasing the first of its "Fusion" APUs
(accelerated processing units), which offer graphics and CPUs on the same chip.
Initial plans called for AMD
releasing its 32-nanometer "Llano" APU,
aimed at mainstream desktops and notebooks, by the end of 2010, with "Ontario,"
for low-cost, low-power systems and embedded solutions, in 2011.
However, now AMD will
release the 40-nm Ontario-which
Meyer called "a game-changer"-in the fourth quarter, with systems
powered by the APU to come out in early
2011. Llano will come out in 2011.
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