14 DAY TRIAL // AMD recently issued a press release to inform its partners and members of the public that the company has lowered its revenue forecast for the third quarter of this year. The chip maker blamed poor yields of AMD Llano APUs as well as the delayed shipments of CPUs based on the Bulldozer architecture.
“The less-than-forecasted preliminary third quarter 2011 revenue results are primarily due to 32 nanometer (nm) yield, ramp and manufacturing issues at GlobalFoundries in its Dresden, Germany factory that limited supply of "Llano".
“Additionally, 45nm supply was less than expected due to complexities related to the use of common tools across both technology nodes.
“AMD continues to work closely with its key partner GlobalFoundries to improve 32nm yield performance in order to satisfy strong demand for AMD products,” reads the statement issued by AMD.
The confirmation regarding Globalfoundries' low 32nm yields doesn't come as much of a surprise as just last week we reported Thomas Seifert, CFO and former interim CEO of AMD, complained about the low performance of the foundry.
These yield issues also led AMD to revise its chip fabrication deal with GlobalFoundries in April of this year.
The new deal allowed the Sunnyvale-based company to pay only for the working 32nm chips the foundry produced, compared to the previous contract that required it to pay for every wafer manufactured (no matter the percent of non-working chips).
The troubles faced by GlobalFoundries have also affected its 45nm production node, as both fabrication processes use a series of common tools.
AMD expects its revenue for Q3 2011 to increase 4% to 6% compared to the second quarter of 2011, reaching somewhere in between $1,6328 billion and $1,6642 billion (€1,2130 to €1,2364 billion).
The company previously forecasted third quarter 2011 revenue to increase 10 percent, plus or minus two percent, from the second quarter of 2011.
In addition, AMD expects third quarter gross margin to range between 44 and 45 percent, compared to the previous forecast of approximately 47 percent. AMD will report the final third quarter 2011 results on Thursday, October 27, 2011.