8/10/2008 - AMD misses the emerging subpar market
The
AMD-Intel battle isn't what it used to be; people actually cared about
their processors during a time when processors' performance could be
quantified. But those days are over.
Now, the two companies are more
or less making the same product with vague performance characteristics,
since the basic architecture of the chips is underutilized. The
multicore designs look good on paper, but the operating systems and
applications still need to find ways to optimize the available power.
Because
of this seeming dead end, various subpar mobility trends have emerged.
By subpar, I mean trending away from performance and toward more
mobility.
I admit that I did not imagine that things would ever get this retro. Apparently, AMD did not see it either.
The
initial thrust into subpar computing began with the slow change from
the desktop computer to "desktop replacement" computing -- using a
notebook instead of a regular PC for actual desktop computing.
Offices
all over the world now have employees working with a notebook on their
desks. They take the things home. They drop them, wreck them and have
them stolen. It's a pain for IT departments. It seems as if nobody but
us old-timers wants to use a desktop machine at work and a notebook on
the road. It's one size fits all.
AMD (AMD:
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc
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AMD
7.53, -0.25, -3.2%) let this market get away and only just now has
released a chip appropriate for the laptop business, the Puma. It took
too many years for this chip to appear, and Intel Corp.'s (INTC:
Intel Corporation
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INTC 23.05, -0.82, -3.4%) Centrino 2, if they can ever get it to work, should replace it immediately.
Meanwhile,
subpar computing continues to evolve. The newest trend is the UMPC, or
******obile PC. It is sometimes called a "netbook," although there is
an unresolved terminology debate about this.
Whatever you call the
things, they were triggered by the success of the $400 EeePC from ASUS.
These are smallish machines with 7- to 10-inch screens and look like
they were mostly influenced by the cheap $200 OLPC (One Laptop per
Child) machines, designed for the Third World.
Acer just released one too, called the Aspire. Dell Inc. (DELL:
dell inc com
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DELL 23.96, -0.06, -0.2%) , Gateway and almost everyone else has announced one of these coming soon.
They sell like hotcakes. They are designed to be "laptop replacements," which makes me laugh.
Intel
has a chip coming out especially for these units, called the Atom chip.
As far as I can tell, AMD is out of this subpar trend altogether.
I
have no idea how long it will take AMD to once again play catch-up in
an emerging market. It's as if nobody at the company is doing strategic
analysis.
How this can happen after its slow start in the booming
notebook market? Mobile computing is just about all the entire industry
has been talking about for the last 15 years! Is AMD deaf?
While the
UMPC market explodes, I don't even want to think about where any of
these companies are regarding hypermobile devices, such as the iPhone,
which itself is becoming a computing platform. The upcoming version of
this device will be getting lavish attention from the drooling media,
like 3-year-olds seeing chrome for the first time.
There are chips in that platform too. They won't be from AMD
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