Over the last few months I have watched a few analysis articles hit the internet with comments about the “stale” PC market and how the desktop PC is dying. These predictors of doom and gloom have always been around and in many cases I have a feeling they are saying these things because they want you to believe them. The funny thing is that the reality of the PC market is quite different from these fairy tales. If you need proof of that you need look no further than the earnings results from the two main CPU manufacturers. Intel posted a record quarter and even AMD is profitable and managed an increase in revenue over last quarter.

AMD has finally started to turn things around on their own. For a little while they were running off of the settlement that they received from Intel and we watched with interest as they dipped back down from profit to loss. However they had a rebound in Q2 and managed a $61 million in net income in Q2. For Q3 AMD has seen a very nice improvement. Their total revenue was $1.69 Billion with a 7% new income increase of just over 7% bringing the Q3 income up to 97 Million. This is a HUGE improvement over Q3 2010 where they posted a $118 Million Dollar loss. Of course this was taken care of in Q4 by the Intel settlement which let AMD post their first positive quarter in something like 5 years.

AMD’s ATi division also saw improvement where they posted a net income of $12 Million. In Q2 this division was down and posted a $7 Million loss. Right now AMD is pointing toward the Llano APUs as the reason for this increase in cash. Another factor in this (according to the AMD press release) is an increase in adoption of the AMD platform in notebooks. They specifically mention Asus, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, HP and others saying that they have globally increased their offerings with AMD APUs.
Things do look up for AMD, but there is an interesting statement in their PR which leads me to think that all is not beer and pizza. Looking at their forecast AMD is predicting only a 3% growth with a 1-2% margin of error. This means that despite the launch of a new Opteron, the new FX Series CPUs and additional OpenCL adoption they are only expecting a 1% revenue increase in Q4. This is not what I would call confidence in newly launched products. We will see if AMD is able to pull off a better increase or if the launch of Intel’s next CPU will put a damper on their Q3 increases and end 2011 for AMD on a down quarter.

Discuss in our Forum