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

April 20, 2012 | 11:06

Tags: #28nm #apu #financial #hsa #radeon #thomas-seifert

Companies: #amd #globalfoundries #taiwan-semiconductor #tsmc

AMD's latest earnings call has revealed a $590 million loss for the quarter, following a charge of $703 million resulting from its split with fabrication spin-off GlobalFoundries.

According to figures supplied by AMD to analysts and press during the quarterly earnings call, revenue from its processor division dropped eight per cent from Q4 2011 but was flat compared to the same quarter last year while graphics revenue was the opposite with no change compared to last quarter but a seven per cent drop year-on-year.

The quarterly figures weren't helped by AMD's purchase of microserver specialist SeaMicro, which chief financial officer Thomas Seifert claims had a further $281 million impact on its cashflow for the quarter. With the SeaMicro purchase largely regarded as a defensive move against the company's well-publicised work on Atom-powered cloud servers, it remains to be seen how investors view the charge.

To give investors something brighter on which to focus, Seifert claimed that his company would be starting production of next-generation 28nm accelerated processing units (APUs) based on the newly-renamed heterogeneous systems architecture (HSA) formerly known as Fusion. The production, scheduled to take place in the second half of this year, will be small-scale at first in preparation for a full-scale launch in 2013.

This comes along with an announcement from AMD PR man Phil Hughes that his company has already begun shipping volume quantities of the second-generation Trinity and Brazos 2.0 APUs to equipment makers. 'Trinity and Brazos 2.0 systems will be available globally soon,' Hughes promised - without, sadly, giving a firm date.

Interestingly, Seifert used the opportunity of the call to come to the defence of fabrication partners including Taiwan Semiconductor, claiming it has not had any problems with 28nm production capacity. '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.'

Seifert's claims of easily-met demand comes in stark contrast to Qualcomm's complaint of 28nm capacity problems at TSMC which has directly led to its being unable to meet customer demand for its Snapdragon S4 system-on-chip products.
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