HardwareThe Business of Tech: Big Quarterly Numbers for Intel & AMD

As we promised last week, we have the Q2’08 fiscal numbers for AMD which came out yesterday. And for the sake of completeness we also have Intel, whose numbers came out earlier this week. We’ll start with AMD. AMD: So much for only losing $200 million this quarter. At face value, AMD lost $1.19 billion this quarter, on revenue of...

As we promised last week, we have the Q2’08 fiscal numbers for AMD which came out yesterday. And for the sake of completeness we also have Intel, whose numbers came out earlier this week. We’ll start with AMD. AMD: So much for only losing $200 million this quarter. At face value, AMD lost $1.19 billion this quarter, on revenue of $1.35 billion. The biggest loss (and biggest change) since last week was that for the second time AMD has taken a write-down on ATI, this time to the tune of $876 million. In the present-term this is a correction of the value of ATI within AMD’s books, but it’s also ongoing proof that AMD paid too much for ATI. The bit of good news here is that write-offs are not the same thing as actually losing money (even though they are calculated against net income), so AMD isn’t $1.19 billion poorer (not that they could afford to be). Real (operating) losses are around $275 million before factoring in AMD’s one-time sale of old 200mm manufacturing equipment, after which operating losses drop to $143 million, a far more minor hit against what cash AMD still has. Furthermore this means losses are reduced compared to Q2 of last year, a positive sign for the company. As for a breakdown on what came from where, computing solutions (CPU, chipset, etc) was $1.1 billion, while graphics (GPU) was another $248 million. CPU sales compared to last quarter are down as is traditional for this time of year, however the average... [ Read more on www.anandtech.com ]

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