AMD punches above its weight

The bitter battle between industry giant Intel and smaller rival AMD has raged for many years. Sara Yirrell met AMD's director of channel components to find out the vendor's plans

AMD is poised and ready to fight for a greater share of the market. And the channel is at the forefront of its strategy.

With chief executive Rory Reid less than 12 months into his role, the vendor is betting the farm on its latest APU technology – a processor which features the CPU and GPI together on one piece of silicon.

Bertrand Conquard, director of component channel EMEA at the vendor, said strong messaging will play a key part in AMD’s plans.

“Our chief executive is making sure we do what we say we are going to do,” he said.

With the market destined to focus on the next must-have technology, AMD is doing all it can to ensure its developments are at the forefront, he said.

“At the moment we have netbooks and tablet PCs dominating the landscape, but soon there will be a new set of technology that will require a powerful system and chips.

“In 2011 we shipped more than 30 million of our Brazos chipsets – the first time we brought CPUs and GPUs together.”

Conquard said the vendor is working hard to ensure the channel is up to date on its latest products.

“Our [A-Series APUs] require a lot of channel education because the technology needs to be comprehended by resellers. It is not just about picking up the CPU and adding graphics, we want to promote that we have a very good system,” he added.

“We are trying to transition products from the old Athlon products through to the A-series. We have a lot going on in Q2. But in order to promote our new technology, we need to liaise with our resellers and invest in promotions.”

He revealed that AMD has recently invested a lot of time and effort in its Elite and Premier-level partners under its umbrella Fusion Partner Programme, but the time has come for the company to focus on its Select partners.

It will be launching a new strand to its channel programme called Select Rewards in the second half of the year, giving its Select-level partners access to the same sort of benefits for selling AMD products that its higher-level partners receive.

“We are talking to our 300 to 400 SMB resellers in the UK, and our retailers, and ensuring that they understand the technology we have. We want our Select partners to be given the same benefits from selling AMD products as our other partners,” he said. “They will have access to co-funding activities around marketing as well as some special pricing.”

We are ready to fight

With the semiconductor market becoming increasingly cut-throat, AMD is aware it has a battle to fight.

According to recent figures from market watcher IHS iSuppli, Intel hit a 10-year high in terms of semiconductor market share, accounting for 15.6 per cent of the market. AMD was in 11th place with 2.1 per cent market share.

Dale Ford, head of electronics and semiconductor research at IHS iSuppli, said: “Intel’s rise was spurred by soaring demand for its PC-oriented microprocessors, and for its NAND flash memory used in consumer and wireless products.

“Intel’s revenue was also boosted by its acquisition of Infineon’s wireless business unit,” he added.
But Conquard said it is not about the competition, it is about the customer.

“We are not thinking in terms of us and them. We have defined what we want to achieve and we want to make sure we provide the best user experience to the customer. This is nothing to do with who has the fastest graphics or CPU. It is about having the best system at the end.

“We believe the path we are following – looking at less power consumption – is the right one, and we are pushing our technology to the market.

“AMD has two technologies, really – graphics and CPU – and we are the leader in graphics. We do not put all our eggs in the same basket. If we are not doing so well on the CPU side, we are leading on the graphics side. We are doing pretty well on the server side as well.

“We need to be ready to attack some parts of the business, and protect other parts. We are both ready to fight and well positioned to grow.”