AMD leads the semi-custom business back to profitability, with net income of $48 million in Q3 earnings

AMD had back from its second quarter slump, and the company has held its word, reporting a net income $48 million in its Q3 financial reports.

AMD cites growth in its Graphics and Visual Solutions (GVS) division, which is responsible for semi-custom products like the chips bound for the upcoming PlayStation 4, Xbox One and the current Wii U.

• “We achieved 26 percent sequential revenue growth driven by our semi-custom business and remain committed to generating approximately 50 percent of revenue from high-growth markets over the next two years,” AMD President and CEO Rory Read stated in the earnings announcement.

 

The Sunnyvale firm (AMD) on Thursday reported a third-quarter profit of $48 million, or 6 cents a share, on revenue of $1.46 billion. During the same period a year ago, the semiconductor maker lost 21 cents a share on $1.27 billion in sales. Excluding one-time items, AMD would have earned 4 cents a share.

Analysts surveyed by FactSet had forecast AMD to earn 2 cents a share on $1.42 billion in revenue. AMD shares fell almost 8% in after hours trading. The company said it expects fourth-quarter sales in a range that could fall below analysts’ forecasts of $1.52 billion.

Other story: Origin PC drops AMD graphics options due to feedback. Origin PC’s move is a blow to AMD’s image; it suggests that the chip designer needs more than just advanced silicon to please gamers.

• This decision was based on a combination of many factors including customer experiences, GPU performance/drivers/stability, and requests from our support staff. Based on our 15+ years of experience building and selling award winning high-performance PCs, we strongly feel the best PC gaming experience is on NVIDIA GPUs.

However, not every portion of AMD’s business is flourishing, however – both its Computing Solutions and GPU segments saw a drop in revenue over the past year, and the company admits that it’s shipping fewer notebook chipsets these days. Even so, the numbers bode well for the company, which posted a total revenue of $1.46 billion for the quarter, alongside an optimistic outlook. After all, the company’s Mantle graphics cards are just around the corner.

 

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Samsung’s next-gen Exynos 5 Octa Powered by PowerVR SGX 544MP3, not ARM’s Mali

 

Samsung has announced during CES its Exynos 5 Octa SoC featuring four ARM Cortex A7s and four ARM Cortex A15s. Unusually absent from the announcement was any mention of the Exynos 5 Octa’s GPU configuration. Given that the Exynos 5 Dual featured an ARM Mali-T604 GPU, we only assumed that the 4/8-core version would do the same. Based on multiple sources, we’re now fairly confident in reporting that the with the Exynos 5 Octa Samsung included a PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU running at up to 533MHz.

The PowerVR SGX 544 is a lot like the 543 used in Apple’s A5/A5X, however with the addition of DirectX 10 class texturing hardware and 2x faster triangle setup. There are no changes to the unified shader ALU count. Taking into account the very aggressive max GPU frequency, peak graphics performance of the Exynos 5 Octa should be between Apple’s A5X and the A6X (assuming Samsung’s memory interface is just as efficient as Apple’s) :

It’s good to see continued focus on GPU performance by the major SoC vendors, although I’d like to see a device ship with something faster than Apple’s highest end iPad. At the show we heard that we might see this happen in the form of an announcement in 2013, with a shipping device in 2014.

 

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Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang believes that consumers realize a great tablet is better than a cheap PC

Nvidia posted recently a record quarter on growing revenue from its mobile business earlier today, and in the following conference call chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang had a few interesting comments to make on mobile.

The gist can be summarized in one sentence: consumers realize “a great tablet is better than a cheap PC.” Huang said this despite the fact that Nvidia makes both desktop and mobile chips, and that’s what makes this statement interesting.

With net income from its Tegra mobile chip reaching $209.1 million, up from $178.3 million, that’s understandable. Moreover, Huang also mentioned that demand for Tegra for Android phones and the Surface offsets declines in Nvidia’s desktop business.

Nvidia is planning to bring its Tegra 4 processors in early 2013, and those will be the company’s first ones with integrated 4G LTE.

source : Venture Beat