AMD has reached profitability for the first time in three years during the fourth quarter of 2009, benefiting from a legal settlement with Intel and a change in its business model. The company reported net income of USD 1.18 billion during the quarter that ended on Dec. 26, an improvement over the loss of USD 1.44 billion it reported in the fourth quarter of 2008. The company reported diluted earnings per share of USD 1.52.
im very pleased to hear that AMD is on the up and up, they have brought excellent tech to the industry (x64) and continue to drive down costs across the board, it would be a real problem for the IT industry if AMD was to pull out of the IT industry.
AMD are becoming a GPU company who happens to have a line of x86 processors.
No they’re not. They are just ahead in their plans for GPGPUs. Their next revision of Mobile, Server/Workstation and Desktop CPUs will do for them what their recent GPU news is doing for their bottom line.
The most important aspect of this revelation is that AMD would have still shown profit without the settlement.
Of course, I helped, in Q4 of 09 I purchased no less than 4 motherboards using AMD chipsets ( all ASRock boards ), 4 AMD CPUs (2x AII 250, pII X3 720, pII X4 945 ), and 3 AMD ATI video cards ( 2x 4670, and a 5770 ).
I’m just glad AMD is back in to being competitive.
My system will play Crysis better than a similar i7 powered machine ( with turbo disabled ). I have x3 720, which I unlocked to four cores and overclocked to 3.2GHz and a 2.4GHz FSB with 4GB of OCZRPR-1066 RAM.
As usual, you never know which OS I’ll be using at any given moment. Currently, I am just working the kinks out of emulating BeOS with VMWare. Haiku was easy… and will soon be on the hardware directly.
BeOS just couldn’t survive my last upgrade. I won’t give up easily, however.
–The loon
actually, amd would have reported a small loss if not for the settlement. net income: 1.18 bil. settlement 1.25 bil
they are betting the farm on fusion. i hope they succeed. but im not confident they will.
AMD should redefine itself as a competitor to Intel or to NVidia.
People still prefer Intel on AMD processors, due to performance gap
And NVidia on ATI cards, due to feature like OpenCL and Cuda features
The problem is that Intel and NVidia may be in a convergence of sorts on their own. Intel’s larrabee might not have been all that hot, but it demonstrates a certain kind of thinking to where things are going.
In that context, AMD is in the perfect position having both things under one house.
I don’t know anyone who owns an nvidia card anymore.
Over the years I’ve bought geforce 2,4,6,7 series cards and since then, I haven’t bought anything except ATI. Even my last motherboard has onboard ATI graphics.
Nvidia really just threw their lead on ATI away.
Intel was still preferred even when AMD was at par or better than Intel, performance-wise. There are lots of arguments as to why but it probably boils down to a lack of Fab prowess and Intel’s pressuring the OEMs.
IIRC, There was a point back in 2003 or 2004 where AMD actually surpassed Intel in terms of retail sales – but at the same time, they were hovering around only 15-20% of the machines shipped by the big OEMs.
IMO, that was one of the most effective demonstrations of how thoroughly-entrenched Intel is. Well, that and the fact that they were able to spend half a decade with the AthlonXP consistently embarrassing the P4 (which was an embarrassment even just compared to the P3) – with no apparent ill effects.
I love AMD, I really do… Someone needs to step on Intel’s and Nvidia’s toes from time to time and they have been becoming more open to open-source as time goes by… however…
How do I get a job where I can run a company in the red for years while raking in C-level exec pay? That seems to be a sweet gig.
Ceo’s are paid on a crazy fallacy:
The jobs are very difficult to get, therefore, the people who do get them must be much more valuable than the the people that didn’t. The immense value placed on them only increases the number of people looking for that job and so on.
IMHO, the gap in skills is not nearly as big as the gap in pay. But unfortunately the people who determine pay are those that have been similarly designated as highly valuable whose best interest is in perpetuating the pay levels.
Sometimes I ask myself if the portrayal of AMD as a competitor to Intel isn’t an overly simplistic one. AMD is often depicted as David and Intel as Goliath, but I think that is too much of a simplification and particularly in 2009 incorrect. When I have a choice I buy AMD processors and not only because they are necessarily faster but also because AMD’s system architecture was better until Intel released Core i7 with its QPI interconnect and Intel tends to scrap basic features (such as hardware-assisted virtualisation extensions) from their low-end models that even AMD’s cheapest processors contain.
The processor is also only just part of the system and I care more about the whole system than just the individual parts. AMD’s onboard graphics are much more powerful and nowadays after the release of open source Xorg drivers less cumbersome to use than Intel’s. With the latter you would probably have to add a graphics adapter to get acceptable performance for anything more graphics intensive than what the basic onboard GPU could handle.
Then there is the other company which is often seen as a competitor to Intel and AMD, Nvidia. I think depicting them as a or the sole competitor in the graphics field is also a mischaracterisation of how that market has evolved for the past few years. After being cornered by both other companies, Nvidia has made the bold move of taking matters into its own hands and developing the Tegra 1 and 2 platforms. Those can be produced at low cost and sold in high volumes with reasonable margins and I don’t see anything from either Intel or AMD to compete there.
Finally I would like to say that I don’t see AMD as the main competitor to Intel anymore. Compared to other semiconductor companies selling ARM SoCs it’s relatively small and it really only plays in the x86 space (servers, desktops and laptops), which seems to become less relevant during the next few years. I would say AMD had better license the ARMv7 architecture and flood the market with cheap chips in order to battle Intel and Nvidia. That looks like a more future-proof strategy to me than constantly having to chase Intel in the x86 market, which is a race it can only lose so that even when it temporarily manages to get an advantage that can only be considered a Pyrrhic victory at most.
Edited 2010-01-25 20:51 UTC