On a broader market outlook, AMD was expected to lose some 18 cents a share this quarter (not factoring in the Intel settlement), whereas they actually only lost 8 cents a share, so the company beat the street in losing less than half as much as was expected. Certainly that\'s good news for AMD, whose long streak of losing quarters has made it an unpopular item.
One thing of interest from AMD\'s results was the average selling prices and gross margins. AMD doesn\'t give us the exact ASP of their products, but they do compare it to previous quarters and years.
In spite of AMD\'s overall better financial position, the ASPs in both the processor and graphics division has fallen both on a quarterly and yearly basis. This isn\'t particularly surprising for the processor division with Nehalem regulating AMD to the sub-$200 market, but it is more surprising on the graphics side where AMD had not been able to sell a single-GPU video card for over $300 for years until now. It just goes to show you that the bulk of products really are sold at the low-end, where prices on older 4000-series products continue to slowly drop. Graphics revenue is a similar story: Up slightly on the year, but up significantly for the quarter compared both to last year and to Q3 of this year.
What is surprising is that considering AMD\'s financial situation, their processor gross margin is pretty good. At 45% they\'re no Intel (64.7%) but it\'s the kind of margin the company needs to pay for things like R&D, particularly since they don\'t move massive volumes of chips like Intel does.
