AMD has released its fiscal report for the last quarter, which was worse than the preceding quarter, although in the black. It seems it has reached a turning point through the APUs Llano and Brazos. Llano shipped 1 million units, whiel Brazos sold nearly six million. Besides that AMD’s Thomas Seifert revealed that it is working on Trinity; the successor to Llano with low energy consumption, and the hunt for a new VP continues.
Overall things look worse for AMD than the quarter before, this is partly for losing shares in desktops and servers, and that the second quarter only had 13 weeks, unlike 14 in the last quarter. The GPU division was down 11% from last quarter and this is a result from lower sales, says AMD.
| Period | Q2 2010 | Q1 2011 | Q2 2011 |
| Income | $1 650 milj. | $1 610 milj. | $1 570 milj. |
| Gross earnings | $125 milj. | $54 milj. | $105 milj. |
| Net profit | -$43 milj | $510 milj | $61 milj. |
Despite the poor result it looks like things are turning for AMD. It is losing ground on markets for the traditional processor, and graphics cards. This is without a doubt due to tough competition , but also the Fusion APUs that AMD has made a huge success. It managed to ship one million Llano APUs (A series) even though the launch was close to the end of the quarter, and nearly six million Brazos APUs (E and C series).
AMD decided to spill the beans on the hunt for a new VP and there is nothing new to tell. It just revealed that there is no pressure or timeframe for when the new leader has to be in place, but it will take the time it needs to find a suitable candidate.
It expects the shares for Llano to grow faster than Brazos during the same timeframe, and look forward to the next quarter. When it comes to design wins with notebooks AMD’s APUs will be over 300 and 11 of the 12 biggest OEM builders are shipping APU-based designs. We are guessing the last one is Apple. This is a personal best for AMD with the number of shipped processors in Q2. It also told bits about Trinity, the successor to Llano and A series.
“We publically demonstrated Trinity, our mainstream notebook APU for 2012. Which we believe will further extend our graphics and media processing leadership. We plan to introduces a version of Trinity that will consume less then half the power of todays lowest power 35W Llano APU, bringing performance computing to the ultrathin notebooks.
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From when AMD showed Trinity back in June
We are slowly moving toward a more mobile life with notebooks, smartphones, tables and ultrathin notebooks. With Trinity it will introduce a model with TDP less than half of 35W that is the least energy consuming AMD Llano APU today. This means we should see Trinity at less than 18W, which equals the Zacate-APU. With that in mind intel is launching 17W for Ultrabooks it is not unlikely that AMD is targeting the same market with its energy efficient Trinity model.
It also discussed tablets and ensured that it has accelerated its roadmap for offering more energy efficient APUs for this market. We can say that AMD is starting to gain market shares in the mobile market, a market where AMD has never been very strong before the Fusion APUs arrived. We will have to wait for the next report to see who well Llano has done and if it will sell bettern than Brazos that launched with the same expectations sold three million samples in Q2, and AMD aims to trump this with Llano.
For a change AMD has a positive outlook in the notebook segment, but for the other segments we can’t say the same since Athlon II and Phenom II are still struggling with no replacements launched yet, Bulldozer i FX. Bulldozer expects to ship within two months.
