The future is Llano
Chip-maker AMD announced Q1 quarterly earnings more or less in line with expectations, although its earnings per share of eight cents was well ahead of analyst expectations of five cents. It brought in $1.61 billion, resulting in net income of $56 million. The fact that AMD is making a profit at all is a welcome change from the past few years.
"First quarter operating results were highlighted by strong demand for our first generation of AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs)," said Thomas Seifert, CFO and interim CEO. "APU unit shipments greatly exceeded our expectations, and we are excited to build on that momentum now that we are shipping our ‘Llano' APU."
Once more Seeking Alpha has done us a favour by transcribing the earnings conference call, and the theme from AMD was very bullish on the subject of its Fusion chips, which combine the CPU and the GPU on one chip, and will define the future success of the company.
The most remarkable figure was that in Q1, half of all AMD's notebook processor shipments were from the Brazos platform, which is the the lower-powered variant of its Fusion generation. That was indicative of how enthusiastic OEMs and the channel have been about these new chips and the ‘performance + battery life' proposition they offer.
Furthermore there was confirmation that Llano - the more powerful family of Fusion chips - is shipping in volume this quarter. Llano chips are higher priced and thus the improvements to AMD's margins that we're already seeing should increase further. There was also confirmation that the new CPU core architecture - codenamed Bulldozer - will start shipping this summer.
When quizzed about its tablet strategy, Seifert kept things vague while insisting there was plenty of activity in that direction. He was similarly non-committal on the matter of the search for a new CEO, stressing that it's more important to find the right person than to strive to hit an arbitrary deadlines.
