What can we blame for AMD's recent lackluster performance?

amdp

What’s the matter with AMD? The number two chip maker in the whole world just posted some numbers that don’t reflect too kindly on its performance over the last few months. The big, bad Sunnyvale, Calif.-based corp lost $416 million last quarter; about $195 million of that was related to a corporate spinoff (see: GlobalFoundries). When put into scary percentages, AMD’s sales fell off 21 percent. Meanwhile, Intel, what with its Core 2 Duo and, more importantly, its Atom, continues to hum along nicely, expecting sales to rise for this same quarter. So what gives, AMD?

A few things, it looks like. One, you can’t ignore the fact that we’ve been in an economic funk for the past several months. People can’t as easily drop a few hundred dollars on a system pieced together from Newegg parts.

But then why isn’t Intel doing as poorly? Well, if you buy a netbook, those tiny, pointless computers that are all the rage these days (unless your name is “Apple, Inc.”), odds are you’ll find an Intel Atom processor in there. How the Atom compares to AMD’s Nano is the subject of many a message board thread, but message board threads don’t pay the bills.

(Sales of ATI GPUs aren’t doing so great, either, for whatever reason. That’s also not helping AMD’s bottom line now that it owns ATI.)

So, yeah. How about the fight for La Liga this year? Pretty damn interesting.

Photo: Flickr