On the other hand it looks like AMD might not have learned lessons from their past. In the last quarter they picked up Seamicro for around $300 million and then went so far as to buy out their exclusive contract from Global Foundries for a cool $700+ million; to do this at a time when the expected revenue was only going to be around $200 million that puts a $590 million deficit.

There are some that claim that this shows good performance, but we have to disagree. In business you try to balance your expenditures with your income. The last time AMD was this far in debt they had a big job of pulling out of the red. Looking forward if AMD manages to maintain the $200 million per quarter revenue then they still have another two quarters to report a loss before they will have a profitable quarter. That is saying that they will maintain or improve sales over the next three quarters. This might be a little rough with things that are coming down the pipe from some of their competition.

Still we have to say that Trinity and Brazos 2.0 should help in this department as they are both more than a match for existing IGPs from Intel and unless things change drastically they should still have an edge on Ivy Bridge as well.

Still AMD’s direction is consistent with what Rory Reed is trying to do (move into the small low power market), but we have some concerns considering his track record at Lenovo. Of course, there is the new “low power” server market that Samsung, ARM, and others are working towards and Windows 8. If AMD can get in on the first wave of thin Windows 8 x86 tablets they could score big around October. So far it looks like the majority of the x86 tablets that will ship on Windows 8 launch day will either be ARM or Intel (Atom and ULV Core i5s and i3s). The launch of these items could have a very temporary impact on GPUs sales as well (which will effect both AMD and nVidia) as the consumer market lines up to get the latest toy. However, even if this is the case you would not expect it to last longer than a quarter… unfortunately that quarter would be the holiday sales quarter which many companies (AMD included) rely on.

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