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The company made a loss of $146m for the three months ending 30 March, from sales of $715m. This represents a 21 per cent decline on revenues from the same period a year ago. Losses were only $9m for these three months in 2002.

One bright spot for AMD was that sales increased four per cent from the $686m recorded in the previous three months, the fourth quarter of 2002. Comparing quarters sequentially like this, however, can be misleading due to seasonal fluctuations. The year on year comparison gives a truer picture, unfortunately for AMD.

Another bright spot was that revenue from PC processor sales increased

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by 11 per cent, to $468. But again, this was compared to the previous three months.

'In a tough market environment and in a quarter that is typically seasonally down, we grew our revenue by four percent from the fourth quarter of 2002,' said AMD's chief financial officer, Robert J. Rivet. 'We believe we gained market share in both our PC processor and Flash memory product lines. And we made significant operating improvements that better position us for a return to profitability.'

In this latest quarter AMD released the Athlon XP processor 3000+, which it boasts is the world's highest performing desktop PC processor, unveiled a line of low-voltage mobile Athlon XP-M processors, and it teamed up with Fujitsu to create a joint Flash memory semiconductor company.

In terms of outlook for the coming months, AMD was upbeat about gaining market share in the wireless segment and is expecting to record a fifth consecutive increase in Flash memory revenues. In what it considers to be its weakest quarter, AMD is only expecting flat sales for its processors.

Cost cutting measures are also threatened.

AMD's 64-bit processor, the Opeteron, will be launched 22 April.