On Thursday, AMD reported its Q3’2008 results and the company managed to “Experience Black” (marketing slogan behind 4870X2). When we look at overall (non-GAAP) numbers, AMD filed $1.776 billion revenue and a profit of 80 million dollars. This was the first filed profit in seven quarters, and in a way, Hector J. Ruiz kept its promise of AMD becoming profitable by Q3’08.
However, the results that Wall Street calculates are GAAP ones, and without that one-time revenue of $191 million (selling equipment to JSC Angstrem, as I first reported here), the company filed a net loss of $67 million on a revenue of $1.56 billion.
This represents 32% higher score than previous quarter, and 14% jump from Q3’07. What made the cut for the company was tremendous growth in graphics, driven by great success of ATI Radeon 4800 series. In graphics industry, there is a saying: “second good generation wins” and it also came true this time around.
ATI Radeon 3800 was the road to recovery after disastrous eight month delay of Radeon 2000 series, and now Radeon 4800 core and 780-series chipsets are leading the recovery. AMD GPG filed the very first profit after AMD’s acquisition in 2006. Operating margin was 12%, all in all a neat improvement. You can see that the hard work of ATI folk is paying up.
When it comes to Q4 guidance, leadership stated that they expect revenue of roughly $1.58 billion or on the same levels as this one. The reason for this conservative guidance lies in the fact that this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday (Thanksgiving) and Christmas season might be significantly weaker. This is also an issue for AMD, because the company let Intel to completely takeover the nettop market, market that was invented by Nicholas Negroponte and AMD.
But that’s typical AMD – the company has always been a reactive one. For instance, ATI launches GPGPU initiative, and then falls behind its competitors. AMD was the first with embedded CPUs form factors, but the company never gave them resources to push the market through (DTX is a good example), first Xbox deal and so on, and so on. If AMD wants to become a real player, the company has to stop being reactive and start being progressive. Nobody cares if you complain about your competitors, if you’re not doing a better job than them – Nvidia’s PhysX deal and The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program just comes to mind. We wish AMD all the best, because without strong competition we’re limited to bad deals, but any problems that AMD had were caused by – AMD itself.
After installing and trying Catalyst 8.10, I’ve just yanked out 4870X2 from my system and placed GTX280 because it is ludicrous that a card with 1600 shaders delivers 40% less points per day (PPD) than 240 shaders inside a single GTX280. GRID Motion blur + 8xAA issue still wasn’t fixed and that was that.
