Looks like AMD has benefited from the same favorable PC updraft that’s lifting Intel. On Thursday, the chip maker reported a narrower third-quarter loss than expected, thanks to “strong demand” for its microprocessors and graphics chips.
When Intel CEO Paul Otellini said “the worst is now behind us,” he was clearly not referring to AMD. Posting earnings Tuesday afternoon, AMD reported an ugly loss of $330 million, or 49 cents a share–greater than the 47 cents analysts had been expecting.
You know things are bad at AMD when the company’s schadenfreude over Intel’s European legal woes spills over into its brand messaging. Surf over to AMD’s Web site this morning and you’ll find foremost on its homepage not a message about Fusion, its next-generation microprocessor design, or branding for its various chips, but a gigantic European Union flag.
After three years, AMD is finally getting around to merging it’s microprocessor and graphics divisions, another stab at reaching profitability after more than two years of losses. On Wednesday afternoon the company said it would consolidate the two divisions into one–platforms and products–led by SVP Rick Bergman.
2008 hasn’t quite proven to be the “phenomenal transition year” AMD believed it would be. Despite new leadership and a restructuring of its manufacturing assets, the company was not able to return to profitability by the third quarter of 2008 as it had hoped. And now, AMD has reported a greater-than-expected net loss for the fourth quarter of 2008—its ninth consecutive one.
If it’s true that “real men have fabs,” as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Chairman W. J. “Jerry” Sanders III once said, then AMD is the semiconductor industry’s latest eunuch. This morning the chipmaker said it will spin off its manufacturing operations, splitting itself into two companies–one to design chips and one to make them.
For a while there, it looked like Advanced Micro Devices was really going to take Intel to the mat, didn’t it? But not lately. After seven consecutive quarterly losses, AMD shares fell to a six-year low last month, down 50 percent in the past year. Good thing, then, that the company has chosen to sell off its digital television business, which these days is more of a distraction than anything else.
Advanced Micro Devices has tapped Chief Operating Officer Dirk Meyer as its new CEO, replacing Hector Ruiz. Ruiz will become executive chairman of AMD and executive chairman of the board of directors.
Ruiz announced the leadership change during AMD’s second-quarter financial earnings conference call. “The time is right to turn the company over to a new leader,” he said.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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