Advanced Micro Devices has reported a net loss of $177 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, citing high restructuring costs - the GlobalFoundries deal went south - and falling sales of graphics products as responsible for its lack of growth.

Strong sales of server systems and chips for laptop computers, however, ensured that revenue was slightly up on the last quarter to $1.69 billion, and in a conference call yesterday with journalists and analysts, AMD president and CEO, Rory Read, remained upbeat.

"AMD shipped more than 30 million APU’s in 2011, resulting in record annual notebook revenue,” said Read.  “The unmatched combination of computing and graphics capabilities in our low-power ‘Brazos’  platform has made it our fastest ramping platform ever, paving the way for continued growth in key segments and geographies.  Our server business has re-gained momentum, delivering two consecutive quarters of strong sequential growth."

Read partly blames the floods in Thailand last year which affected the supply of hard-disk drives worldwide thus impacting on sales of AMD’s graphics products, but expects the market to return to normality in 2012 with an increase in sales of its Radeon HD 7970 GPUs. With the introduction of the AMD 'Trinity' series of APUs, which will enable its OEM partners to build ultrathin notebooks, it also hopes to compete against rival Intel who also has major plans to penetrate the growing notebook market.

Nonetheless, AMD has now forecast a further 8 percent drop in revenue for the current quarter. Shares in the company dropped by 1.23 percent by close of trading on Tuesday.

Full details of AMD's Q4 results can be found here.