The short answer is they were cash flow positive, they had an actual loss of $9M (trivial), and a one time "write down" of 1.6B which is a non-cash expense. (Ati is now valued at less than the purchase price - but affects nothing).

AMD gained share from Intel, grew gross margins, and shipped 400,000 Barcelonas in Q4. The 9m loss was actually in the gpu biz, but they made money in the consumer electronic biz, and cpus.

Note also that they ended the quarter with nearly $2B in cash on hand, and burned no cash in the quarter.

Folks, AMD is going to be here for a very long time.

Plus

In other words they paid way too much for ATI

When they say a net loss of 1.7 Bil on revenue of 1.7 Bil, does that mean that they ALMOST broke even? Or that they made 1.7 Bil but their costs were twice as much?

No, that's backwards, it means that they had revenues of 1.7B and expenses (or writedowns) of 3.4B which resulted in a loss of 1.7B.

1.7B - 3.4B = -1.7B Profit

However, the vast majority of this loss was due to the impairment charge of the ATI aquisition. In terms of operating expenses/profitibility, there was only a 9M loss which is a huge improvement. AMD now is guiding a Q3'08 operational profit since Q1 and Q2 are seasonally down from Q4 and they likely won't improve.

EDIT: This is a reply to #1

$9 million in losses is pretty small compared to last quarter... i think AMD's plan to return to profitability is coming along nicely. next quarter might even report positive earnings.

Man I wish I could write off 1.7 billion!

I'm going shopping!!!! Supercomputer here I come!

At under $7 a share it's tanked. Can only a.) go up, or b) be bought out and go up. The floats stabilizing...break up value still higher than market cap...should be good for a 5 point pop. Prolly won't get a better deal in the next 5 years.

No matter how it's spun, they're doing better than Merryl Lynch.

i'm way out of my depth here now
i wish i took some course in this kind of thing
struggling to get my head around how the numbers add up

i think i might wait for the sec filing
that usually has numbers in there that i understand easier

Where does the 600M that Dubai gave them sit in all of this?

I read elsewhere that their revenues were in line with analyst expectations, and that the value of their stock actually went up a bit after the release of the report. Here's the link to that. It's mentioned at the very end:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080117/ap_on_hi_te/earns_amd