AMD reported weaker-than-expected results for the second quarter of 2012, its CEO Rory Read attributing the results to weak sales of desktop processors in Europe and China and to the poor overall economic conditions.

“This execution in the second quarter is disappointing, and we will correct it,” Read said in a conference call announcing the results. “I believe that we lost market share in the quarter.”

The company reported US$37m in income on a total of $1.41bn in sales for the second quarter. The revenue figure represented an 11% decrease sequentially and a 10% decrease year over year.

The company has high hopes for the future, however, especially in the “mega-data-center” market. AMD has seen good uptake of its recently launched Bulldozer processor by high-performance computing (HPC) customers and plans to build on that momentum.

“There’s no doubt that that success is a good foundation and showed an early progress,” Read said. “We need to leverage our Opteron Bulldozer solution which is a solid technology on the key workloads and key customer segments, where we enjoy a performance advantage.”

These processors are not restricted to the HPC space. In June, for example, Cloudera certified a Colfax server cluster built on AMD Opteron 6200 (Bulldozer architecture) processors to run its Hadoop distribution platform.

AMD also expects its acquisition of SeaMicro in February for $334m to pay off as the market for many-core computing grows. SeaMicro’s intellectual property gave AMD another weapon to tackle the data center market with.