Advanced Micro Devices Inc reported a net loss of $38.4m on sales of $456.9m for its third quarter ending Spetember 29th yesterday, a loss of $0.28 per share. The loss includes the $6m charge it stood for severence pay of 200 redundancies at its Sunnyvale, California plant, announced last month (CI No 3,008). Last quarter AMD reported a $34.7m loss, which included a $16.3m gain resulting from a sale of securities, on sales of $455.7m. For the first nine months of 1996 the loss amounts to $47.7 m, compared to $207m profit last year. Although bookings improved significantly over the second quarter, the book-to-bill ratio remained below 1:1, according to AMD chairman and CEO William Sanders III. Revenues from the firm’s Mach family of programmable logic devices were down slightly, while flash memory sales resumed growth and telephony products achieved record revenues. But EPROM sales were sharply lower, and the Computational Products Group – responsible for AMD’s Intel-compatible processor line – saw revenues insufficient to absorb the substantial costs of maintaining our strategic commitment to the Microsoft Windows-compatible microprocessor market, said Sanders. Sales of the Pentium-compatible K5 line more than doubled to 500,000 units -but they only began shipping in April (CI No 2,881). Overshadowed by its poor results, the company launched faster members of the K5 line yesterday, the AMD-K5-PR120 and PR133, claiming performance equal to or better than 120 and 1 33MHz Pentiums. They are priced at $106 and $134 for quantities of 1,000. Latest recruit for the chip is Acer America Corp, which will use the 75MHz and 100MHz versions of the chip for its AcerEntra desktop computer line.
