Targeting tablets and netbooks, but swerving 'heavily crowded' smartphone market.
At an analyst call, the company said it would focus on system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs and low-power solutions.
Thus, AMD's first mobile chip—codenamed Hondo —will run on Windows 8 tablets later this year. The firm will also be making one, two, and four core chips for mobile devices.
It is keen to mark its territory in the fastest growing sections of the computing space. It reckons notebooks, tablets and embedded solutions are growing respectively at a 8.4 per cent, 18.6 per cent and 15.1 per cent a year.
The desktop and server markets, by contrast, are growing at 2.8 per cent and 5.3 per cent - and are anyway dominated by Intel.
AMD won't bother with desktops, or indeed the smartphone space, which is utterly in the grip of ARM/Qualcomm/TI and, according to AMD, "heavily crowded with low margins."
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AMD CEO Rory Reed said the firm's most successful platform to date is Brazos, a Fusion range for ultra-portables. He said 20 million Brazos chips were shipped in the last year.
It all heats up the clamour for market share in the chipset space, with ARM powering on and Intel recently declaring its intention to break into portable computing via its Medfield family of processors.
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This chip vendor is focussed on graphics and servers and has no stomach for the low power space of the smartphone and I think that makes business sense for them. The strength in their architecture, the process they are using and the paths to market lay in enabling the cloud, if I were them I would concentrate on servers.
The smartphone space is ImgTec and ARM and TSMC, with those who know the chip business, have licenced the IP cores and understand the need for wafer starts to assure supply set to be the winners. My bet, Qualcomm and nvidia.
Dave Everitt Feb 3rd 2012 at 11:35PM
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