AMD Loses $1.18B and Its CEO - Page 2

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The sun will come out, tomorrow…

The good news, Rivet said, is AMD is getting traction in new products, as indicated by a steep increase in sales of triple and quad-core products on the desktop and server as well as on the graphics side, where the ATI HD4800 line is getting good reviews and lots of design wins.

"We're regaining server momentum and winning back customers on the strength of workloads and floating point performance in Quad Core Opteron," he told the conference call.

AMD also launched a line of Business Class commercial desktop and notebook solutions in the second quarter and more important, Puma, its first mobile platform. Rivet said it had scored more than 100 design wins, many of which will show up in the third quarter for back to school sales.

Meyer did most of the talking on the call, which seemed appropriate now that he's in the driver's seat. "Looking at the recent past, we have not lived up to our potential," he said, a curious, or perhaps frank comment, as he has worked hand in hand with Ruiz for the past two years to lead the company.

"Looking forward, we will. We will focus on x86 and leadership technologies, and we will execute, execute and execute," he added. "I still believe in the strength of the products we've introduced in the second quarter, that we can be operating profitable in the second half of the year."

Meyer said he saw signs of a shift toward value-based computers at the right price points, which echoes what Gartner said recently about the trend in lower-cost PC sales. AMD will focus on "volume markets, traditional markets that AMD and ATI have been focused on for a long time," he said.

That means the traditional desktop market, notebook PCs and the volume server, especially single and dual socket servers, as well as adjacent markets, like network and storage hardware and the game console space. Meyer also expected to see server sales contributing more to the top line, i.e. revenue, in the future, as will the Puma platform.

Although AMD also promised its second half would be better last year, analyst Nathan Brookwood thinks this time the company has a better chance to deliver the goods..

"The new notebook platform will help them, they didn't have 45 nanometer on the horizon, which helps with cost and performance," said Brookwood, research fellow with Insight64. "So they do have something for them for the second half of the year, assuming they execute, that they didn't have going for them a year ago," he told InternetNews.com.

With mobility gaining so much traction, Brookwood felt Puma was especially well-timed to help the company. "Considering how well they did in notebooks when they didn't have anything notebook-focused and they were cherry picking desktop products and putting them into notebooks, their prospects are pretty good," he said.

He admits to being stumped as to what asset smart is supposed to be. "Nobody understands what it is and they refuse to clarify what it is," said Brookwood. "They've been playing this game for a year and it's extremely frustrating for everybody trying to understand it. Their explanation has been if they told you it would screw the deal, but that's getting old."