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[Verge] AMD sees opportunity in 'chaos' of Windows 8

Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are all working hard to brand the devices using their hardware, insisting on seeing their names on product packaging and, quite often, during bootup sequences.

AMD is going the other way, with Leslie saying it's more important to the company to help its hardware partners brand and distinguish their products with a quality user experience. Somewhat akin to Texas Instruments' withdrawal from the consumer chip market, AMD is more concerned with keeping the direct buyers of its processors happy rather than informing the end user.

In the end, if the AMD user experience is indeed noticeably superior to the competition, that will pay off no matter what label is placed where.
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Wow, now that is downright scary in a dejavu sense.

That mentality is almost word-for-word exactly what TI CEO Rich Templeton use to extoll in TI's quarterly satellite broadcasts when justifying his strategy for not wanting to brand Texas Instruments in the mobile phone business.

AMD is reinventing the wheel here, and that wheel leads to a self-limiting dead-end unfortunately.
 
Very excited for the next-gen low-power CPUs.

Atom has always been very painful to use, and Bobcat was good for its time, but feels kinda slow now. Does anyone know what clockspeed Hondo is going to be running at? If its ~1ghz, the thing is going to feel SLOW in Windows 8.
 
Idontcare said:
Wow, now that is downright scary in a dejavu sense.

That mentality is almost word-for-word exactly what TI CEO Rich Templeton use to extoll in TI's quarterly satellite broadcasts when justifying his strategy for not wanting to brand Texas Instruments in the mobile phone business.

AMD is reinventing the wheel here, and that wheel leads to a self-limiting dead-end unfortunately.
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I don't agree with that assessment. I think it is true that people (those on this forum being an exception, of course) don't care who supplies the components of their computers, tablets, etc. Even with Intel's massive marketing campaigns most of the non-technical people I know focus on the brand name of the computer, tablet, or phone.

That being said, Intel did a fantastic trick with their whole 'Intel Inside' campaign, and elevated themselves from component supplier to 'Sponsers of Tomorrow'.

The salient trend AMD is identifying is the increased importance of consumer experience over technical specifications, which is driving the importance of the brand name of the OEM over component branding.

This is a trend that I think both AMD and Intel have recognized, although they are responding to it in different ways. Intel has responded with platform brand names 'Centrino', 'Ultrabook', etc. AMD is responding to it by fading into the background. Both are reasonable strategies, and we can point out suppliers in many industries (including the tech industry) that are successful using each. For example, Foxconn seems to survive just fine without branding 'Made by Foxconn' on everything they touch. Intel is on the other end of the spectrum.

Getting back to the point, this isn't the 'death knoll' of AMD, though it should inform us on their relative power in the supply chain. That is, they don't have any. As a result, they make themselves more attractive by being easier to work with. Sad state of affairs for them (we all know who is making larger margins), but still a workable business strategy. TI's problem is that they don't have an LTE baseband, so why would anyone use OMAP5 when performance with Krait is already very close (if not already to) good enough for most people? (Before the next big use-case, anyway).
 
podspi said:
I don't agree with that assessment. I think it is true that people (those on this forum being an exception, of course) don't care who supplies the components of their computers, tablets, etc.
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That isn't the problem, and wasn't my point. But enough about all that, its onwards and upwards for AMD from here, no doubt they will succeed where others have failed.
 
NTMBK said:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/27/3416330/amd-windows-8-chaos-opportunity

Quite an interesting take on it. I just hope AMD can actually get someone to ship a tablet with Hondo in it (and its Jaguar equivalent next year). It's going to be an interesting fight, because the next gen Atom (Valleyview) looks like its going to be a pretty awesome chip too. It all depends on how fast each side can get their chip to market.
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AMD sees an opportunity everywhere. The question is can they bring out a product on time with sufficient performance to take advantage of the opportunity.

They are always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow(BD is great, the software is just not right, Fusion is the future, GPGPU computing is the future, etc, etc.)
Maybe they are right and one of their initiatives will become mainstream and they will hit a home run. IMO though, none of them will really take off and AMD will still be mired in the low end barely making a profit sometimes and losing money at others.
 
Idontcare said:
That isn't the problem, and wasn't my point. But enough about all that, its onwards and upwards for AMD from here, no doubt they will succeed where others have failed.
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Perhaps I phrased my response poorly 😎

MY point was that people don't care about component suppliers, therefore component suppliers brand name maintenance is no longer important.

AMD's response to this trend is to essentially give up and make it easy for OEMs to work with them w/out having to jump through hoops.

Intel's response to this trend has been to create platform brand names which they hope consumers will associate with positive experiences.


Frankly I think Intel has already been pretty successful in marketing Ultrabooks, I've heard people talking about Ultrabooks very positively, even if they don't own one. This in and of itself is a threat to OEMs, who want consumers to recognize THEIR brand names. That's the advantage of working with AMD, no hoops. Downside is that AMD's products are lower volume, and (generally) lower performing.

I think perhaps Windows 8 is a big opportunity, but probably moreso for ARM than AMD. AFAIK, there are almost no decent x86 tablet parts for Windows 8 at this time. Current-gen Atoms are well, current-gen Atoms. I haven't heard of any AMD tablet design-wins, and Ivy-based tablets are going to be very, very expensive (and still get poorish battery life compared to their ARM counterparts).
 
podspi said:
AMD's response to this trend is to essentially give up and make it easy for OEMs to work with them w/out having to jump through hoops.
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Definitely. The fact that they are now able to integrate 3rd party IP and Bobcat cores (and presumably Jaguar cores) into one chip is a big deal. It's not unrealistic to see them pursuing an AMD style model in the tablet space; integrating decode blocks and the like dictated by a customer, shipping large quantities of semicustom silicon to be built into tablets. If the likes of HTC are sensible, they'll see what Apple has been doing with semicustom (and now fully custom) ARM chips in the iPad, and take note.
 
frozentundra123456 said:
AMD sees an opportunity everywhere. The question is can they bring out a product on time with sufficient performance to take advantage of the opportunity.

They are always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow(BD is great, the software is just not right, Fusion is the future, GPGPU computing is the future, etc, etc.)
Maybe they are right and one of their initiatives will become mainstream and they will hit a home run. IMO though, none of them will really take off and AMD will still be mired in the low end barely making a profit sometimes and losing money at others.
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IN FACT the software is PISS Poor. Better software design with multi-threading whether in games, databases, or other software products would lead to a greater performance improvement than any hardware could in itself bring.
The programming design in most PC games is DREADFUL. We are in the day of multi-core processors and these idiots can't spend the time for ,multithreaded programming.
 
The bluestacks thing was something simple and easy. If they can make it smooth and seamless, then nobody is going to care about the technical details. All they will know is that this amd windows 8 tablet can go to a website and download an app that basically turns it into an android tablet at will. It is simple and understandable. It wont matter that you can technically do it on an intel tablet too... especially if the atom tablets run like crap.

There is no reason for the bill of materials cost of an amd x86 tablet to greatly exceed the bom of an android tablet. Therefore there is no logical reason for anyone to own any non-amd tablet... once the idle battery life issues are addressed, and of course the distressing gap between android and x86 MSRPs....
 
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