CFO Marv Burkett told a conference calls that some of the fabs it used were are at capacity now and the company would like more wafers.
Santa Clara, California-based has undoubtedly benefited from AMD $5.4bn acquisition of its great rival ATI Technologies in July 2006, which has left it as the sole major independent supplier for Intel platforms. In its second quarter, which is usually slack, net income leapt 99.1% to $172.7m on revenue 36% higher at $935.3m.
By contrast, when AMD reported its second quarter last month, it said graphics segment revenue of $195m was flat with the first quarter.
Understandably, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang did not credit ATI’s disappearance as any independent vendor with any part of its own success. Instead, He believed the strategy of extending the reach of the graphic processing unit (GPU) was paying off.
He said there was a fast-growing universe of applications that rely on the processing capability of the GPU, from 3D design and styling tools, video and photo editing software, 3D maps, and video games, to the user interfaces of the Mac and Vista.
Huang attached great importance to its recently announced Tesla range of high-performance computing processors, which used the computational power of its GPUs, which could be over 100 times greater than the fastest microprocessor and is aimed at the high performance computing market.
He claimed the Tesla architecture, and supporting C compiler and development environment is called CUDA, had far exceeded his expectations and was being used by thousands of programmers.
