Contrary to what some might believe, AMD isn't doing very well with its chip business at the moment. Sadly, this holds true even if we take in consideration the favorable articles that have been recently written in support of the company's latest Radeon graphics cards. In fact, it is exactly the graphics segment that is giving AMD a hard time, two years after the acquisition of ATI.

According to the numbers that are being circulated in the online media, the Sunnyvale-based chip manufacturer will take a charge of $880m in the second quarter of 2008. This high amount, which will undoubtedly impact the company's future revenues, is related to some of ATI's former business units. As already mentioned, AMD acquired ATI's business back in 2006 - which, apparently, is still taking its toll on the company's revenues, contrary to early optimistic estimations.

Two years ago, AMD purchased ATI for $5.4bn, an acquisition that was seen as an impressive step on the part of the Sunnyvale chip manufacturer, mostly because people believed that it would enable AMD to eventually put an end to Intel's dominance in the x86 processor market. However, that hasn't happened to this day, and AMD is yet to unveil a multi-core processor that can provide more computing power than Intel's upcoming Nehalems.

With all this, AMD's acquisition of the graphics manufacturer seems to finally come with some benefits as well - according to recent reports, AMD is expected to steal the performance crown from competitor NVIDIA in the graphics department. And it will do so with the release of the HD 4870 X2 graphics card, which is said to arrive on the market before the end of August.

The upcoming Radeon has already found its way out, right into the hands of a number of editors who have put it through a series of tests. From the looks of it, it outperforms the HD 4870 in every way. And this is probably why AMD plans on selling it for approximately $500 - but no official price has been confirmed so far.