Intel’s earnings tend to set the bar for the rest of the industry, but they can also set the bar pretty high. In this case, however, its main rival in the x86 CPU market, AMD, had an equally strong quarter. Like Intel, AMD’s sales were buoyed by a slate of new releases running the gamut of laptop to server and also graphics cards, something Intel doesn’t offer.
The first quarter is usually a slow one as sales take a breather from the Christmas rush, but like Intel, AMD enjoyed better-than-expected sales across the board. Datamation has all the facts and figures.
Thanks to robust sales of everything from its Turion II laptop processor to the 12-core Opteron, AMD reported GAAP earnings of $257 million, or $0.35 per share, on revenue of $1.57 billion for the quarter ended March 31. One year prior, when the industry hit a free-fall, AMD sales plunged to $1.18 billion and it lost $416 million, or $0.66 per share.
This quarter, AMD took a one-time, non-cash gain of $325 million for finally ridding itself of all connections to Globalfoundries, its former fabrication plants that have been spun off as an independent company. On a non-GAAP basis and excluding the gain, AMD reported net income of $63 million, or $0.09 per share.
That’s still worlds better than the $0.07 per-share loss analysts had been expecting on sales of $1.54 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.