Chipmaker AMD has said it would take charges totaling a whopping $948 million for the second quarter of this year. The majority of the charges are related to the acquisition of ATI Technologies in 2006, according to a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). A fuller picture emerges when the latest charge is combined with the $1.77 billion impairment charge that AMD already took in the last quarter of 2007. What happened is that AMD essentially had written down 50 percent of the $5.4 billion that it assigned against ATI during the acquisition.

AMD has also been conducting layoffs, and has taken aggressive cost-cutting measures in order to break even by the end of the year. This is in the wake of AMD reporting a loss of $358 million in the first quarter. The company's second-quarter financial result is scheduled to be released on July 17.

For more information on this report:
- check out this InformationWeek article