Earlier this year, AMD CEO Hector Ruis boldly pledged to return the company to profitability in the second half of 2008. A recent iSuppli report indicates that this may be an even harder task than originally projected, as AMD actually lost market share in the first quarter of 2008 compared to the fourth quarter of 2007.

In the first quarter, Intel earned 79.7 percent of the revenue in the global microprocessor market, compared to just 13 percent for AMD. For Intel, those first quarter results reflected a net gain of 1.2 percentage points, while AMD's 13 percent revenue share was 1.1 percent lower than what the company netted in Q4 2007. The good news, however, is that AMD's market share rose 2.2 percent in the first quarter of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007.

Additional market share is a good thing, but revenue is quite valuable in its own right, especially for a company as cash-strapped as AMD. The company's second quarter results should be available in the not-too-distant future, and are likely to be a far more accurate bellwether of AMD's likely performance through the end of 2008. AMD launched a number of new products or product revisions since the last few weeks of Q1, including the 780G chipset, Phenom's B3 revision, triple-core CPUs, and just recently, the ATI 4850 and 4870 video cards. These last launched too late to have more than a minimal impact on the company's second quarter financials, but the combined impact of all these launches put together might have shifted AMD's revenue in a more positive direction.

iSuppli expects total PC sales to grow by 10.5 percent in 2008, with much of this growth driven by laptop sales. Laptop shipments in the first quarter of 2008 grew by 30 percent year-on-year, while PC sales remained more-or-less flat. AMD's current presence in the laptop market is relatively weak, but the company has plans afoot to address these concerns as well. AMD recently launched its updated Puma mobile platform—shipping laptops should be on shelves later this year—and has also revealed some information on Shrike. Shrike isn't due for over a year, but will launch the first Fusion-class integrated GPU+CPU combination that AMD has been talking up since it acquired ATI.

We'll know more about the impact AMD's flurry of launches (and layoffs) have had on the company's bottom line in a few weeks, once it announces quarterly results. One additional positive bit of news coming from iSuppli's report is that processor ASPs (average selling price) remained flat for both Intel and AMD through the first quarter. The latest price war between the two companies is apparently over. That news doesn't guarantee that AMD will become profitable again, but it does mean relief from the battering the company took in 2007 when Intel repeatedly slashed its CPU prices.