Tag Archives: mainstream markets

A Man With a Short Memory

In an interview with Business Week Dirk Meyer shows that he doesn’t understand where the computing market is going.

Yet that is one PC segment that’s a little healthier right now and AMD isn’t participating in it. Why is that?
We consciously focused our R&D dollars, which obviously given our size are smaller than Intel’s, on the big mainstream markets as they exist today. Knowing that this trend toward lower power consumption and more mobility is going to happen, we just decided to load that into the R&D pipeline for later. It’s not a big volume target and not a big dollar opportunity.…One of the saddest things about the PC industry right now is, since late last year, all anyone seems to want to ask about is netbooks. Good grief! It’s a low-cost limited-function device. There’s not much excitement or money in dollar volume there.

The writing was on the wall years ago when the first notebook was available for $1000. Processing is going mobile. Sales in volume and value are higher on notebooks than on desktops. Not only did Intel see this first, but the CEO of AMD has firmly placed his head in the sand on the matter. He’s worried about winning the war in notebooks AMD’s already lost and ceded the next frontier to Intel.  The game isn’t going to remain notebooks or netbooks.  It will go smaller.  It will be cellphones and other personal communications devices that will evolve.  While AMD is worried about the “big money”, Intel is setting the stage to make a run at the king of cell phone processing, ARM. Not only do Meyer’s words speak to his short memory with regards to how AMD got into their most recent trouble, but their lack of preparedness in terms of products shows it.