News AMD reports $590 million loss, claims no 28nm issues

AMD has reported a $590 million loss for the quarter, largely due to its SeaMicro purchase and GlobalFoundries deal.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/04/20/amd-q1-2012-loss/1

 

Jeeze. How long can they continue to lose money?

 

They spent $984m on charges/acquisitions and had a total loss of $590m. This means without those decisions the company would have announced a profit of $394m.

 

Sea Micro acquisition was a good one, and there were other buyers sniffing around. They got in first and purchased a company that is making some VERY interesting products. Imagine if the Sea Micro servers were powered by 28nm Bobcat 2.0 quad-cores instead of Atoms?

The Global Foundries exclusivity contract was the last link that bound AMD to a single fab. The one off charge to GloFo means that AMD can take their work to other fabs instead of being tied to GloFo.
I think this was a good decision too. It means that AMD can take their CPU/APU work to competing fabs/processes instead of being held hostage to the schedule/investment of GloFo. AMD can now go to the fab that has the most mature/best/cheapest/highest performance/newest technology/<insert optimum characteristic> process available.

 

The above is all true. Being limited to a single fab was virtually a choking point for AMD. We all remember the horrible power-draw of the Bulldozer samples, because GloFo couldn't get the process quite right. It'd be interesting to see if things will start to look up for AMD Next year, now they're a bit more free to operate, and own Sea Micro. I simply hope the shareholders can see the sense in this.

Tl;dr: They made a loss at the moment, but set themselves up for much better profits in the future. In theory.

 

'We were able to meet customer demand in the first quarter,' Seifert explained, before admitting that 'we would like to have more access to the upside volume, but we have met pretty much all the demand in the first quarter.'

Possibly because AMD doesn't have as much demand for it's 28nm products compared to Qualcomm?

 

Or, alternatively, AMD took up a large part of the Capacity, giving others a slimmer look-in at the process for their products?

We'll probably never know so, as always, the speculation is rampant, and the two sides will never see eye to eye.

 

It shouldn't come as too much of a shock that there is a far greater market for <$600 smart-phones than there is for <$600 graphics cards. It would be interesting to compare the die sizes of the Snapdragon S4 SoC to that of a HD7750/HD7770.

Further there has got to be enormous pressure on Qualcomm to have sufficient quantities of SD S4 available for the handset makers to put in their new products. No maker is going to want to be left with nothing to offer as their competitors tout greater processing power/longer battery life on new models. Previews are showing it is going to be seriously fast, so demand will be very high.

 

I have to say the marketing decision to write 8 core on the side of the bulldozer chips was a good one, in the last few weeks the number of people who wanted an 8 series FX chip just because it said 8 core was huge. shame for them people look at benchmarks before making large scale orders...

 

I thought we were done with the whole "Is a Bulldozer module 2 cores or 1?" argument?
Can we move on to some other pressing matter, like whether or not ATI has fixed their graphics drivers yet?

 

I bet those figures are gross though. I hear that they are actually still losing money.

 

iv still got faith in amd's apu/hsa concept, I believe......lol....naw seriously, trinity is going to change the game for mid range gaming, if they can release a chip with 6/700 stream cores, and implement crossfire x properly, they got a winner in my eyes, I want to build the slimmest gaming pc I can, and with trinity and a discrete mobile gpu, tied to an fm2 laptop motherboard, I can see me getting down to around a 1 cm thick case, I havnt seen anyone use a laptop motherboard for a custom pc before, (i might be wrong, but I havnt come across such a build) so I think my next build may be unique in that aspect, getting hold of the parts may prove a challenge though, I may just have to buy a trinity based laptop and rip the board out of it....

 

How long can they continue to lose money?

 

They need a new foundry...

 

A small loss for AMD. I should have supported them by buying a bulldozer but I don't have room for it in my back yard.

 

AMD's graphics drivers work fine for most of their customers. Otherwise, they wouldn't buy AMD.
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Hope to see profit from them next quarter... and not another 'one-time' charge netting a negative again...

 

They spent $984m on charges/acquisitions and had a total loss of $590m.