That was up from $1,23bn for the first quarter of 2005, or $780m excluding revenue from the Spansion memory chip unit it spun out in 2005, according to the company.

The company's earnings per share far exceeded the consensus estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Financial, hitting $0,38 compared to an expected $0,30.

Sales in the first quarter were driven by strong demand for dual-core processors for servers and workstations, leading to record sales of the Opteron processor, AMD says. Another factor driving company earnings was an increase in average selling price, according to the company.

In general, users in the commercial sector increased their adoption of systems with AMD's server and desktop chips, compared to rival Intel. Sales of the Turion 64 mobile processor were also up compared to the fourth quarter of 2005, the company says.

Sales were strongest in the regions of Greater China, Latin-America, Russia and South Asia, according to AMD.