Buoyed by sales of its high-flying 64-bit Opteron processor, chip-maker AMD yesterday reported hefty third-quarter sales of $1.24 billion and net income of $44 million.
"AMD's 64-[bit] processors now represent over one-third of our processor revenues, on track to becoming 50 percent of our processor revenues by the end of the year," Ruiz told industry analysts.
Ruiz also said there has been good customer response to the company's recently introduced low-end Sempron CPU, which is aimed at the value segment of the PC market where machines sell for $500 or less. Sempron is effectively replacing both AMD's old-line Duron CPU and its Athlon XP processor. The latter chip, which will largely be phased out after the first quarter of next year, is a 32-bit CPU.
Its successor, the Athlon 64, is Opteron's desktop cousin. While 64-bit processors are already hot in the server space, they won't be a big factor on the desktop until Microsoft's 64-bit version of Windows XP becomes available next year. Once that happens, AMD expects Athlon 64 to take off in a big way.
Yesterday, Ruiz reported that AMD's processor business overall jumped 21 percent from the second quarter to the third quarter. Sales are expected to rise further moving forward.
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