AMD is doing rather well, despite its core PC market being gutted by economic concerns. Lately the company has been trying to refocus its business as sales of laptops languish as companies put off buying new PCs and consumers are too broke to buy new PCs when the old ones are not broken.

AMD on Thursday reported revenue of $1.09 billion, down from $1.59 billion in the year-ago quarter. It said June-quarter revenue would rise two percent compared with the March quarter. But this is much better than the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had predicted. Analysts on average expected first-quarter revenue of $1.046 billion and June-quarter revenue of $1.071 billion. 

Intel posted similar sorts of results on Tuesday and bet on a recovery in PC sales in the second half of the year.

But AMD is managing to save cash in a more traditional way. It is slashing operating expenses and refocusing its chip technology on new markets like communications, microservers, game consoles, digital signs and stripped-down "thin client" computers.

AMD said in a statement it had a net loss of $146 million in the first quarter, compared with a loss of $590 millionin the same quarter last year.