[Solved] AMD Beats the Street; Reports 128 Million Dollar Loss for Q3 2009

Despite what JennyH said in another thread, AMD posted a loss of $128 million.

http://www.reuters.com/article/pre [...] BW20091015

While this may sound like bad news, it's actually good news. AMD beat analysts' expectations and is getting closer to the black.

Will Q4 be their quarter? I still don't think so, but it looks distantly possible now.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] only-worth

Just to clarify - amd made a profit on their 'products', ie everything they sold. That part of the business is profitable again, and that's what really counts.

AMD didn't just beat analysts predictions, they were more than twice as good as what was being predicted. -18c a share was better than every single one of the analysts were predicting. The best prediction was -21c, AMD beat them all.

They can hardly fail to not post a small but noticable profit in Q4. ATI have hundreds of millions to make on graphics next quarter, that alone should be enough to push the entire company into a profit of $200m-ish.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] only-worth !!!!
>.>

I don't think i5 can outperform phenom II 955 if the phenom outperforms a i7...
don't forget the limited Dual GPU because of dual x8
And the fact that this socket won't have 6 cores while AM3 will have BOTH 6 AND 8 cores, one for 2010, the other for 2011.

I ALWAYS SAID THAT LGA1156 WAS EVILLL!!! >=D

I don't have the 1156. I have the 1366. Given that my i7 920 is 2x faster than my X4 810, in applications that I actually use... I don't see how I missed out.

AMD is making a 6 core, Intel is too. Intel plans on an 8 core, and I don't doubt AMD will do the same. So what?

Intel is currently ahead of the curve on performance, and I don't see why they'd lose it in their refinements of i9. I put my money down betting that my socket 1366 will last longer on the performance curve than the AM3 socket. I don't want to spend another $750 on a new MB+RAM+CPU combo to start over when my MB is no longer upgradeable. If and when AMD's new 6 core chip comes out to beat the i7, they'll officially be a year behind on performance compared to Intel. Meaning the extra $260 I paid on the i7 system is what I paid to not have to wait a year for AMD to catchup.

Of course, knowing if 1366 actually does outlast the performance peak of AM3 is in the stars. But I have a hard time being convinced that I paid extra for no good reason. Especially when I can see the performance difference clear as day between my two computers when I transcode.

I don't think 1156 is evil...

It caters to the mainstream market very well.

Many? I'm sure the defective Foxconn boards are floating around, but it isn't a huge epidemic. "Some" would be a better term I suppose.

No you didnt!
The thread I made CLEARLY states that this is for people who GAME ONLY (most of the gamers NEVER zip OR video encode...that is why I made that thread).
You talked about DVD ripping, thus making a i7 a way better deal, I will never deny that.

I don't get it... why would anyone who is a "gamer" care about the CPU choices one makes? GPU performance is what usually determines the true performance of most games anyway right?

Yes but to some extent comes bottlenecking from your CPU, thus making your GPU not work the way it supose to work.
One simple example is this review from Guru3D
http://www.guru3d.com/article/rade [...] iew-test/7

As you see, even the intel i7 can't fully support a 3way HD5000 serie.
it cant provide it with enough horsepower, thus making a 3way Crossfire less good then a simple crossfire.

Anything under Phenom II 955 or 965 is LIKELY to bottleneck someting as high as the HD5870 on crossfire. As for 955 or 965, nobody really know until we get some real good benchmarks. Don't forget that the 955 was a big enough jump from the 940.

You don't need 3 way to encounter a bottleneck.
As you can see in this benchmark, the 3 ways is just abit stronger then the HD5870 on crossfire.
To make it more simple, the i7 was just a LITTLE close to be the cause of a bottleneck with HD5870 crossfire (aka Hd5870x2, or HD5900 seems to be the new name for dual chip..)
We still cant say 100% sure that Phenom II 955 can be the source of a bottleneck in the current generation, But id be surpised if a cpu that came 1 year after the i7 can cause a bottleneck where the i7 dont... VERY surprised, especially when that both CPU performs same when handling GPU's (phenom II 955 even performs better in most cases)

.....? what was the point of this answer?
I basically said that you didn't waste your money going i7 and this is the answer I get?
Where is the trolling? Your mad because a Phenom II 955 performs the same as your super special awesome
"<Gaming PC> | Cosmos 1000 Case | Zalman 850W PSU | EVGA X58 3XSLI | i7 920 OCed to 3.3GHz Stock Voltage/Fan | 6GB OCZ Platinum 1600 | Sapphire HD5870 | 2x Samsung 2343 (2048 x 1152) + 1x Samsung 2333HD (1080p) | 4x 1TB HDs in RAID 5 | Windows 7 Build 7100" In gaming?

Once again, I am talking only gaming wise and this is why I said you didn't waste money so what the hell was the point of that reply? I didn't claim anywhere that this is my thread?
learn courtesy, it could help you in life instead of always jumping to conclusion and been mean.

Yes I am wasting my time, because you are obviously the idiot type and cannot take time to check how this thread moved to this topic.

This is what made this thread change subject

I answered to HIM who said that he would go with i7, so I don't even know why the fk did you get involved in this whole i7 thingy. Your answer was that AM3 is not a dead socket, your the one that started arguing with me over i7 vs phenom II and your clearly one big idiot.
This isnt your thread either, I have the right to talk, if your not happy, bang your head on the wall.

Really? you can get a pretty decent P55 mobo for about $134. Not much difference between it and the $200 option sans some IEEE connectors that most gamers don't use.

And DDR3 can't be the reason since its now cheap thanks to Core i7 pushing it.

I think its hard to say if you have a LGA1156 Core i7 860 vs a Phenom II X4 955. the price difference is not that great and the performance is very dependant.

Sorry but you have two things there I don't like:

1. That link about LGA1156 being dead is wrong. Thats been a planned CPU from the start. Its a low end dual core. We don't know Intels full plans for LGA 1156 yet.

2. You complain about dual x8 PCIe 2.0 when even current gen GPUs can't fully saturate dual x16 PCIe 2.0 ports. Just like a GPU at the time didn't fully saturate AGP when it was mothballed.

Now if they did, then I would understand. But until it does, x8 is fine. A lot of places have done tests and show the performance loss is minimal until you go from x16 to x4.

As for AMD, good for them beating the expectations. But lets see how they fare when those Senior Notes come due. Might take a chunk out.

I hear you.I usually use ASUS boards myself but apparently many of the P55 boards (ASUS included) are using those defective Foxconn socket parts.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] ost4064455

Also Toms Hardware has noted some other problems with these new motherboards.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 36-15.html

However I think that they are in the process of being fixed so I would avoid these early P55 boards until then.Myself I WANTED to build a i5-750 system I guess I'll have to wait for a while.

1. This is for next year, While intel will release a less performant dual core, intel will release a 6 core. If we consider the next year, no matter what intel will release, amd will have the bulldozer 8 cores. If I remember correctly, the LGA1156 is a Quad-Core SKU and will simply never get the upgrade that AM3 or LGA1366 will have. In the end, people that want performance/buck will ditch LGA1156 for AM3 because they have cheaper CPU than the LGA1366.

2. Check this out:
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 33-14.html

2 HD5850 on crossfire. The cpu used was the very powerfull i7-860 instead of the i5 that most ppl will get. Lets assume the horsepower of the CPU wont be a cause of better performance.

The first chart is only interesting because it has the Bloomfield in blue, the lynnfield used here was overclocked and I would like to compare stock to stock.

Check the green lines in the second chart for L4D.
The performance on a Dual X16 is 162 on stock
The performance of dual X8 is 137 on stock.

Thats near 30 FPS you lose.
Once again you have to consider that the cpu horesepower MIGHT come into action we never know and 2
Those were 2HD5850. 2HD5870 will require FAR more power. And if we get 30fps drops with HD5850, we don't know for HD5870. Now those are the YEAR old games. Imagine with crysis 2 for example (or whatever will use the cryengine 3) In a requiring engine like cryengine, EVER fps count. So for the same $$, People will probably afford a Phenom II 955 and being 100% future proofed for Dual GPu.
Even if there is no "big" drop, 30 was enough to scare many people and i5 lost alot of popularity to the Phenom II 955 in MANY forums I went in.

Of course all of this is speculations based on a review about 2 different hardwares, not the CPU we wanted and not the "latest" gpu.

So now we have a choice between a Quad-Core Socket, versus a will be 12 core socket. (http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15566/35/) Now this 12 core will be a server CPU, but we still have the 8 cores (http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15939/35/) for desktop while LGA1156 will stay tweaking the 4 cores. We also have choice between a Full future proof DualX16 or a dualx8 that already showed some weakness with only 2HD5850.

All this for the same price.
The only factor left is wether you prefer intel, or AMD. =/ So no I don't think I can convince you.

Wrong on that first chart it showed the difference between 16 X 16 scaling of Bloomfield vs the 8 X 8 scaling of Lynnfield.
In the 16 X 16 CF'd scaling L4D showed 163.2 FPS with 8 X 8 scaling the FPS was 160.8 with Lynnfield.In the article it mentions that no performance drops greater than 5%.
In most circumstances it's around 2 to 3 %.

The second chart showed the difference between a stocked clocked P55 Core i7 870 and one that was overclocked to 4 Ghz which showed an increased frame rate by 23.8 frames per second from 137 FPS to 160.8 FPS

This is pretty amusing. All we need is that one dude. AMD for LIfe!

Which is supposed to bad news?


For the second 3rd quarter in a row, the analysts were way off.

I cannot believe that there are bigger trolls than me out there…

Besides, thats chump change. Consider Bank of America lost 2.25 billion in the 3rd quarter alone.

What's done is done. Barring a disaster AMD are not going bankrupt any time soon, the actual products will be break-even over the year I'm sure, which although not great is a lot better than leaking $2bn in a year.

The huge losses have been over for a good few quarters now and there is no way they will be back because they have been scaled down so much now. AMD is leaner and fitter than ever, and in a good position to make money on good products - unlike the past two years where it was basically too big and bloated to justify the market share.

Hmm, I thought Intel was the only one with a conviction around here .

It's just plain fact, staring everybody right in the eyes but too few are actually looking back.

AMD are much, much leaner than they were 2 years ago. Just look at the figures too, lower cost of sales is why the recession isn't hurting so much even with revenues way down (for both intel and AMD).

There is nothing magical in AMD's Q3 results, it is just up the same as intel was but still down on Q3 2008. Had it been AMD of 2 years ago, still trying to pay for the fabs they probably would have gone under with the recession. Spinning off the foundries will be seen as a masterstroke as soon as global foundries starts paying back, and that isnt far off now.

AMD are healthy, in so much that they have profitable products during a recession. The debt is still an obvious burden, and global foundries could end up getting too big for them right now, but if AMD had to ditch glofo and pay off the debt they would basically be a break even company, struggling a bit in cpu's but gaining in gpu's.

That is a helluva lot better than it was 2 years ago.

Well you can reel off all the analysts you want but I was the one who said they would post a $120m loss while they were thinking double that at best.

It's not just about investing either, there are a lot of people who got rich fast when AMD were languishing at $1.62.

$1.62 for AMD, how ludicrous does that look now? Sometimes the analysts get it wrong, and for the second year in a row they have been waaaay off AMD's 3rd quarter results. They are still predicting a loss in Q4, based on what I have absolutely no idea. It's clear to me that most of these analysts don't actually analyse much except for pie charts and diagrams. They simply do not know what AMD have coming up in Q4 and they don't realise how bad a shape Nvidia are in either.