Things looking up for AMD

Processor and graphics card manufacturer AMD has posted its Q3 2011 results, and things are looking up for the previously-troubled company.

Its total revenue for the quarter is $1.69 billion (£1.04 billion), up seven per cent on last quarter, with a 4.5 per cent increase in sales.

While Bulldozer might not have the clout to take on Intel, it seems that the company has found success in its Fusion APUs - which combine the processor and graphics card on a single chip.

This has led to a dramatic turnaround - whereas the company reported a loss of $118 million (£73 million) this time last year, the latest results indicate a profit of $97 million.

Cold Fusion

AMD notes that most major notebook manufacturers have jumped on the Fusion platform, including Acer, Asus, HP and Toshiba.

It also reports a 10 per cent sequential growth in its graphics card division, formerly known as ATI.

AMD has always played underdog to Intel, but it seems Intel's reluctance to get into the lucrative smartphone and tablet processor market has put it on shaky ground.

AMD, on the other hand, has less to lose by staying desktop and laptop-oriented.

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RIM looking at customer compensation for BlackBerry outage

RIM's co-CEO's Mike Lazaridis and Jim Ballsillie have confirmed that all BlackBerry services are now fully operational, and that the company is looking into customer compensation.

Speaking at a hastily convened press conference to deal with the fallout from the recent BlackBerry outage, Lazaridis apologised again for the problems and said the failure was caused by a protection switch in the servers failed, which created a mail backlog that toppled the service.

RIM also pointed out that the service has been operational for 99.7% of the time over the last 18 months, although how much that will appease the millions of angry BlackBerry customers is hard to tell.

We want our money back

When probed about compensation for the consumers that paid for an unobtainable service, Ballsillie said the issue was "something we plan to come back to these customers on very, very soon."

The issue of deciding how much compensation, and how to offer it, is a tricky one, given there's no easy way of evaluating how much disruption each user was caused.

Oh, and one final piece of advice from the @UK_BlackBerry Twitter feed: "If you are still experiencing any delays with messaging or browsing, please try rebooting your phone by the battery removing then reinserting."

We wonder if anyone tried the same thing with the servers...

Things looking up for AMD

Processor and graphics card manufacturer AMD has posted its Q3 2011 results, and things are looking up for the previously-troubled company.

Its total revenue for the quarter is $1.69 billion (£1.04 billion), up seven per cent on last quarter, with a 4.5 per cent increase in sales.

While Bulldozer might not have the clout to take on Intel, it seems that the company has found success in its Fusion APUs - which combine the processor and graphics card on a single chip.

This has led to a dramatic turnaround - whereas the company reported a loss of $118 million (£73 million) this time last year, the latest results indicate a profit of $97 million.

Cold Fusion

AMD notes that most major notebook manufacturers have jumped on the Fusion platform, including Acer, Asus, HP and Toshiba.

It also reports a 10 per cent sequential growth in its graphics card division, formerly known as ATI.

AMD has always played underdog to Intel, but it seems Intel's reluctance to get into the lucrative smartphone and tablet processor market has put it on shaky ground.

AMD, on the other hand, has less to lose by staying desktop and laptop-oriented.