A bloody price war with Intel is costing Advanced Micro Devices dearly.
Despite continued strong volume shipments of its Athlon and Duron processors,
the company said its overall sales will be down and a substantial loss will
result from the combination of slow PC demand and aggressive pricing by Intel of
its latest processors.
AMD executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer, Rob Herb,
said there would be 15 per cent fall in sales in the current third quarter from
the second quarter. Sales of flash memory products would also go down by about
30 per cent, or $100 million. ''A revenue decline in this range would result in
an operating loss for the third quarter."
Herb said PC processor unit sales in the current quarter would remain at or
near the record level of 7.8 million units achieved in the second quarter. In
what can be termed as good news for AMD, the top Linux software distribution
companies, Caldera, MandrakeSoft, Red Hat, SuSE, and Turbolinux announced they
have certified the AMD Athlon MP processor and the AMD-760 MP chipset, for one-
and two-way Linux workstations and servers.
"Certification of the AMD Athlon MP (multiprocessing) processor and
AMD-760 MP chipset by the leading Linux distributions is a key element to help
AMD expand its presence in the Linux workstation and server markets," said
AMD Computation Products Group’s vice president (Platform Engineering and
Infrastructure), Richard Heye.
"These certifications demonstrate that business customers can take
advantage of robust and reliable AMD Athlon MP processor-based workstation and
server solutions running on the Linux operating system," he added.
AMD made a strong showing at the LinuxWorld show in San Francisco this week
with a dozen software and server companies showing products build around or
running on AMD Linux machines. The AMD Athlon MP processor is a x86 processor
designed for high-performance multiprocessing servers and workstations.