AMD was supposed to lose 42 cents in the third quarter on sales of $1.26 billion according to the smart money on Wall Street. Instead it up and came in Thursday with losses of only 18 cents a share on $1.396 billion in revenue.

Now as nice as that is for AMD, it's even more important in what it says about the economic recovery, especially when paired with Intel's consumer-driven homerun results the other day.

Imagine AMD as a mini-bellwether.

Its Q3 revenue - thanks to growth in both microprocessor and GPU shipments - was up 18% sequentially but down 22% - naturally enough - from $1.797 billion last year.

Losses total $128 million, part of which can be attributed to repurchasing debt, which added eight cents a share. The company's operating loss was $77 million.

CEO Dirk Meyer said "improved factory utilization rates, higher microprocessor average selling price and an increase in 45nm product shipments resulted in a gross margin improvement from the prior quarter" up to 42% from 37% in Q2.

As for outlook, AMD took the cautious approach and said what it said last quarter: It expects revenue to be "up modestly."

AMD still carries the results of its spun-out factories on its books to justify its x86 manufacturing license from Intel, an issue Intel takes exception to. AMD without the factories actually made money in Q3, reporting a non-GAAP net income of $2 million and non-GAAP operating income of $47 million. In the second quarter of 2009, it had a non-GAAP net loss of $244 million and a non-GAAP operating loss of $205 million. AMD, the sales company, managed a non-GAAP gross margin of 38% compared to 27% in Q2.

Meanwhile, Google and IBM, two major bellwethers like Intel, also reported Thursday and both hit the ball out of the park.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt declared the recession is over - well, the worst of it anyway; he's prepared to start hiring the right people again and is very optimistic about ad budgets next year; he's going to focus on strategic deals and acquisitions, both large and small, investing "heavily" in Google's future.

Google, which is back growing again after a nasty first half, made a record $1.64 billion in Q3, $5.13 a share - up 27% compared to $1.29 billion or $.06 share this time last year - on revenues up 7.3% to $5.94 billion; the results topped estimates which were way off.

Paid clicks, down 2% in Q2, were up 14% in the U.S. year-over-year and 4% sequentially. Cost per click was up 5% sequentially, but down 6% compared to last year. Google's traffic acquisition costs (TAC), what it pays for business, came to $1.56 billion or 27% of ad revenue.

Android, by the way, has garnered 12 devices in 26 countries and 32 carriers. Schmidt claims Android adoption is "about to explode." And YouTube, the company says, should turn profitable in the "not-too-distant future." Google is monetizing more than a billion videos a week. Otherwise mobile searches on Google, a cultural comment, were up 30% from 2Q and Google says it can see that consumers in emerging countries are coming online.

As for IBM, well, Wall Street wasn't as quite happy with its performance as with Google's, which was up 17 bucks after hours while Big Blue was down close to five bucks.

IBM came in at $2.40 a share or $3.2 billion, up 14% on $23.6 billion in revenues, down 7%, with a gross margin of 45.1%, up from 43.3% - thank you, software and services - and raised its full-year guidance to $9.85, up from $9.70. Wall Street was thinking $9.78.

Still and all service revenues were down 7% and software down 3%. Revenues were down 5% is the US, 12% in EMEA and flat in Asia. IBM's expecting revenue growth this quarter.