Repeat losses for AMD total billions of dollars

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), manufacturer of computer processing chips, this week announced its fifth-straight quarterly net loss, totalling US$1.772 billion. This loss was greater than its revenue for the same period, which was $1.770 billion.

The loss was largely due to charges related to AMD’s takeover of graphics chip maker ATI. Without the charges - totally $1.675 billion - AMD said the loss would have been just 97 million. This is still almost four times the 25 million the company lost in the fourth quarter in 2006.

AMD has been consistently failing to distribute its newest processors on time. In early December AMD delayed shipments of its quad-core Opteron processors when they found a bug in the chip’s cache memory. In addition, AMD are delaying the release of their quad-core Phenom 9700 and 9900 processors.

On the plus side, AMD reported record sales for the quarter, shipping almost 400,000 quad-core chips.