AMD has reported a net loss for the fourth straight quarter, which the company blamed on costs still arising from last year’s purchase of graphics vendor ATI.

The chip manufacturer recorded a net loss of $396m for the third quarter of 2007, though revenue rose to $1.632bn.

That increase of 18 per cent on the same quarter last year was led by a 43 per cent rise in sales of its laptop chips.

Having lost valuable ground to Intel in the battle for server processor customers in recent quarters, the arrival of AMD's much-delayed quad-core Opteron processor in September, has also opened up a new revenue stream, the company said in a statement.

Robert Rivet, AMD's chief financial officer, said he was encouraged by the progress the company had made in the third quarter financial results.

"We delivered a strong revenue increase, gained eight percentage points of gross margin and reduced our operating loss by more than half," he said