

Vision is AMD's attempt to simplify PC marketing for consumers









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Marketing from R&D money
By fzkl on 9/10/2009 1:20:29 PM , Rating: 2
At what seems like a time when AMD needs every penny to invest in R&D and come out with products that make up for its shortcomings against Intel, they choose to spend money on marketing.

Sounds pathetic. Is the end near and consequently a desperate measure to sell something from their inventory (this is probably why I am not running a company, maybe the management has some secret weapon) ?

RE: Marketing from R&D money
By crimson117 on 9/10/2009 1:43:00 PM , Rating: 3
That's kind of what they're doing here, I think.

Their immediate shortcoming is that AMD's CPUs can't compete with anything Intel has above $200. Below $200 where they do compete reasonably well, profit margins get pretty tight.

So they need to distinguish themselves, and they're taking a page from Centrino (which was a hugely successful consumer platform campaign). Intel's marketing then boiled down to: Centrino means it's a wireless laptop that works out of the box. They timed it perfectly and executed it perfectly.

So AMD wants that too - they want people who bought a laptop with crappy Intel graphics a few years ago to tell the salesperson their old laptop stutters when they watch HD movies on it, or try to edit their own HD camcorder movies. And the salesperson says, oh, you want guaranteed multimedia capabilities? Then you want this PC powered by AMD Vision.

Intel has gotten away with keeping prices down by using cheap graphics. AMD wants to turn decent graphics into the norm (leveraging their ATI brand), so Intel will have to catch up and raise prices by buying third party GPUs.

What I'm wondering is whether AMD can make any money off of this before Intel comes out with Larrabee. . If they can make Larrabee look like it's Intel playing catch-up, AMD wins and their ATI investment really pays off. Otherwise, AMD will need a new plan.


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