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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

AMD's first quarter results are out, and the company did less worse than last year [anandtech.com]:

Looking at the overall quarter, AMD had revenues of $832 million, which is down a significant 19% from last year. But the good news for AMD is that their gross margin is up to 32%, an increase over last quarter and having it come back to the same level as a year ago. AMD reported an operating loss of $68 million for the quarter, which is an improvement over the $137 million loss last year.

AMD predicted 15% revenue growth for the second quarter, and its shares surged 52% [bloomberg.com]:

AMD also announced an x86 and SoC licensing agreement with Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co., Ltd [anandtech.com] that will make the company at least $293 million:

However what those products will be remains to be seen. While AMD is announcing the formation of the joint venture, their participation, and what they stand to gain, any actual product announcements are the responsibility of the joint venture. What AMD is emphasizing at this time is that this is a joint venture for high performance processors, that it is designed to complement AMD's existing server efforts, and that the SoCs will be leading-edge products. Just what a high performance processor is – and whether that means a multicore-heavy design or something using fewer, higher performing cores – will definitely be a burning question between now and the joint venture's own product announcements. Overall, at this point what AMD is describing does not sound like the joint venture will simply be developing cheaper, lower performing processors for the Chinese market.

AMD's Zen CPUs and Polaris GPUs will be out this year, and its K12 ARM server chips are expected next year.

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