AMD released its financial results yesterday, and, well, to quote Marketwatch, “the results were muddled by a confusing press statement that failed to break out any per-share figures that could be used to compare with Wall Street’s own estimates.”
The AMD spin is that they basically broke even in Q4. This is not so.
Rather than glaze your eyes over with accountingese, and since most of you just want to know if they’re going to be able to keep making stuff, this is all you need to know:
To get a bit more concrete, the CPU market improved a bit for the Christmas quarter, but Christmas wasn’t terribly good to either AMD or Intel, unit sales for AMD only went up 7%.
ASPs went up a bit for both AMD and Intel, but, as we’ll explain tomorrow, that is becoming a bit of a mirage for both parties.
ATI’s results were rather underwhelming. Despite their new products, video card sales stayed flat. When you consider all the interest AMD is paying from the debt it incurred buying and other-ATI related expenses, ATI is now the prime money-loser, and must do much better to even break even in 2008.
I wish I could go on to talk about future AMD products in general and 45nm products specifically, but they said virtually nothing about those. They got some 45nm chips back for testing, but made no claims about them.
As we’ve said previously, now and the next few months are going to be a quiet time for AMD. Things won’t get seriously exciting, good or bad, again until around May, when we’ll know what the 65nm K10s will end up doing, have a clue as to what 45nm K10s are likely to do, and most importantly, know where the economy is going.
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