Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday reported a heavy loss for its fourth quarter, due mostly to charges connected to its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI.
AMD reported a net loss of US$1.772 billion — greater than its revenue for the quarter, which was US$1.770 billion. The figures compare to a loss in the fourth quarter last year of US$576 million on revenue of US$1.773 million.
The net loss included charges of US$1.675 billion, mostly related to AMD’s acquisition of ATI in 2006. Excluding the charges, AMD said its loss would have been US$97 million, greater than the US$25 million it lost in the fourth quarter a year earlier.
This is the fifth-straight quarterly loss for AMD, which has been struggling to get its newest processors to market on time.
AMD delayed volume shipments of its quad-core Opteron processors, code-named Barcelona, in early December when it said it found a bug in the chip’s Level 3 cache memory. Earlier this month, AMD said it was pushing back the release of its quad-core Phenom 9700 and 9900 processors.
The company still managed to ship a record number of microprocessors in the quarter, it said Thursday, including nearly 400,000 of its quad-core chips.
AMD hopes to double its Opteron shipments in the first quarter of 2008 compared to the fourth quarter, said Bob Rivet, executive vice-president and chief financial officer at AMD. It will ship sample Barcelona processors in larger volume to OEMs in the next month to put in systems, said Hector Ruiz, AMD’s chairman and CEO.
AMD hopes to return to profitability by the second quarter of 2008, Rivet said.