AMD reports fifth straight quarterly loss
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AMD reported a heavy loss for its fourth quarter on Thursday, due mostly to charges connected to its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI.
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In the fourth calendar quarter of last year, Intel made the most headway against arch-rival AMD in the server CPU market in several years, surging ahead in shipments and reportedly taking back a few points of market share. Now, AMD is working to take those points back and then some.
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STMicroelectronics NV  reported a quarterly loss compared with a year ago profit on Tuesday, citing about $906 million in impairment and restructuring charges.
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Intel Corp.'s share of the market for personal-computer processors dropped to its lowest in 11 years during the fourth quarter as the chipmaker lost orders to Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) saw its short streak of quarterly profits come to an end, as sales growth slowed in the fourth quarter due to competitive pricing for its flash memory products, the company said Tuesday.
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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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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.
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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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Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices  Inc. AMD.N on Tuesday reported a quarterly loss after a  year-earlier profit, weighed by weaker memory chip sales and a  charge related to debt.
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NEW YORK, October 5  - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.NYS) has projected its 3Q04 sales below expectations, with a sequential decline from the previous quarter.
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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.The biggest hit went to its quad-core microprocessor, code-named Barcelona, which it needs to compete against Intel among server vendors. The chips, along with AMD&#39;s desktop platform, Phenom, won&#39;t be generally available to customers until the first quarter of next year. The products were supposed to ship in volume by the end of this year, but&#160;a technical design error in the chips caused AMD to slow the schedule so it could apply a fix, said Dirk Meyer, the company&#39;s president and COO in a meeting with analysts on Thursday.The company&#39;s Puma platform, a set of chips aimed at laptop PCs, will also be delayed until the second quarter of next year, a costly miss considering the fact that the laptop PC market is growing at around 30 percent per year.AMD also reduced its planned spending on new production lines to $1.1 billion from a previous estimate of $1.7 billion and said all its business divisions wouldn&#39;t return to profitability until next year.The statements caused AMD&#39;s stock to fall as much as 5 percent during early trading on the New York Stock Exchange, before rebounding to down just 1.8 percent, at $8.81 in the afternoon. The market was still open as of this writing.AMD executives apologized for missteps, such as the delay in Barcelona.&quot;We blew it, we&#39;re very humbled by it, we learned from it, and we&#39;re not going to do it again,&quot; said Hector Ruiz, chairman and CEO of AMD. He said AMD would go back to its habit of under-promising and over-delivering.To start, the company will be on a path to break even financially by the second quarter of next year and return to profitability by the end of the third quarter, he said. The financial performance will be boosted by the launch of several new products in graphics, chipsets, digital TV processors, and more, not including the delayed products.The company forecast its processor shipments will rise at least 15 percent next year, while graphics processor shipment growth will be greater than 6 percent, digital TV processors more than 13 percent, and handheld chips up 8 percent.AMD&#39;s gross margin will rise to between 46 percent and 50 percent next year, up from 37 percent during the past four quarters, said Bob Rivet, chief financial officer of AMD.&quot;We&#8217;re in a massive product refresh. In 2007, we were living on some old stuff. 2008 is all new stuff, and we believe it will yield goodness,&quot; he said.
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Worldwide&#160;lawsuits against Intel&#160;and&#160;four straight quarterly losses&#160;have distracted AMD during its integration of ATI Technologies, but the merger remains on track, according to industry analysts.AMD&#39;s acquisition of ATI&#160;for $5.4 billion, announced in July 2006 and completed one year ago Thursday, was viewed as a potent weapon in AMD&#39;s attempt to dent Intel&#39;s domination of the x86 processor market.The lawsuits against Intel and&#160;financial losses&#160;came at a critical time, when AMD&#39;s management needed help in integrating the ATI acquisition and making ATI employees understand AMD&#39;s culture, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.AMD filed antitrust lawsuits alleging monopolistic behavior against Intel in the U.S. and Japan, and lodged complaints with the European Commission, the Korean Fair Trade Commission and Japan Fair Trade Commission.The distraction was compounded by the departure of key executives, including David Orton, former president and CEO of ATI, who resigned as executive vice president of AMD in July after only 10 months.AMD didn&#39;t have any internal problems, Peddie said, and Orton left on his own accord. &quot;A little redundancy will always occur in all organizations. It&#39;s not surprising to see people shift,&quot; Peddie said. However, outside speculation about the departure may have distracted AMD during the integration, he said.AMD also took an acquisition-related charge of $76 million, or $0.14 per share, in the third quarter of 2007 ending Sept. 29. That added to the quarterly net loss of $396 million.Despite the distractions, AMD is pulling its resources together to ensure the ATI merger goes smoothly.&quot;The merger has allowed AMD to merge its plans with ATI, which were very similar prior to the acquisition.&quot; Peddie said. Both companies wanted to amalgamate the CPU with the graphics processor, and the acquisition puts them in a position to do so.A successful merger could help AMD reach profitability in a few quarters and position it for success in the future, wrote Doug Freedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, in a research report.&quot;We believe ATI is turning the corner, which is likely material to AMD&#39;s quest for profitability,&quot; Freedman wrote.The acquisition of ATI hasn&#39;t shown an immediate benefit, but could help&#160;AMD in the long term&#160;when the company&#39;s &quot;Fusion&quot; project comes to fruition, Peddie said. Fusion is the code name for is AMD&#39;s next-generation processor design that is expected to combine high-performance graphics and CPU processing on a single die. The project was announced when the merger was completed. AMD is not prepared to talk about Fusion yet, but it is intended to bring the cost of PCs down and reduce power consumption, Peddie said.AMD also announced the &quot;Spider&quot; platform, which will include AMD&#39;s upcoming Phenom chips and high-end graphics processors to provide users with the &quot;ultimate visual experience&quot; in computing, said Dirk Meyer, AMD&#39;s president and chief operating officer, on the company&#39;s third-quarter earnings call last week.With all the attention focused on Phenom and Spider, ATI&#39;s involvement in other businesses gets sidetracked, said Phil Hester, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AMD. AMD&#39;s ATI unit is a big player in supplying graphics to consumer electronics, set-top boxes and gaming consoles, Hester said. ATI supplies graphics processing units (GPUs) for Microsoft&#39;s Xbox 360 and Nintendo&#39;s Wii consoles, Hester said.&quot;Discrete GPUs will continue to be a good business for us,&quot; Hester said. AMD&#39;s graphics segment revenue grew 29 percent to $252 million sequentially, driven by the success of the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics processors.However, ATI&#39;s market share in the discrete graphics market has been hit by manufacturing problems and bad timing in bringing chips to market, Peddie said. Competitors such as Nvidia and Silicon Integrated Systems stepped up by shipping graphics chips on a timely basis, taking market share away from ATI.&quot;Market share could begin to swing back towards ATI even if it introduced simply comparable products to Nvidia in the near-term,&quot; wrote Doug Freedman in a research report. ATI&#39;s RV670 graphics card is competitive in the mainstream market with current Nvidia products, Freedman wrote.But AMD still has work to do to make the merger a success. Its biggest threat remains Intel, which maintains a stranglehold on the chip market.&quot;AMD must rebuild its brand value in the enthusiast market in order to garner better mainstream adoption and consumer recognition,&quot; Freedman wrote.
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Agere Systems Inc. AGRa.N on Tuesday  posted a fiscal fourth-quarter loss as the communications chip  maker's revenue declined and it took hefty charges for  restructuring.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc  , the world's second-largest maker of computer  microprocessors, on Thursday posted a wider quarterly net loss  due to a $1.68 billion charge related to its purchase of  graphics chipmaker ATI.
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The medical device maker reported a third-quarter loss of $272 million on charges related to acquisitions and asset sales, as the companyâs top-selling stent continued to slump.
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InfoWorld - Amid further delays of AMD's quad-core server chip and plans to write off goodwill from the acquisition of ATI, AMD executives are going to face tough questions when they meet financial analysts in New York Thursday.
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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?