THE BIG INTERVIEW
AMD says all three major games consoles – the Xbox, PlayStation and Wii – are based on its technology
probably not the same company anymore.
Is that because generally in the emphasis in tech has been moving away from traditional PCs? It is – but still a 300 million-unit PC market is not a small one. But there’s always room for us to transform, change and grow. This is not saying we’re going to abandon the classic PC space, but we are leveraging transitions within the market.
And your most recent financials were described as better than expected, what’s doing well at the moment? We did beat guidance quite a bit, the numbers came in higher than even the top-rate predictions. One of the biggest factors was
computing space, up 12 per cent which is relatively big. And there was a share increase last quarter, so I know our friends at Intel probably aren’t going to be that happy. We achieved a relatively brutal step up in unit shipments. You can see from a thrust into the mobility space, which is mainly notebooks and tablets, that we have the strongest and broadest portfolio. You can see my team pushing more aggressively into the mobility space,
www.pcr-online.biz
because that’s where a lot of the transformation is going to happen. We have strong guidance going forward – a 20 per cent revenue increase next quarter, in line with the Playstation 4 and Xbox One. When you come to a company you
want to see some leadership – because it’s very difficult to compete in this world if you’re a ‘me too’. Our ATi Radeon brand is the best on the planet. And we’re using this IP and dropping it into the processors as well. For decades the CPU was seen as the dominating factor in how powerful a PC was. But these days it’s a combination of graphics as well as CPU horsepower. This is why we think the APU (accelerated processing unit) is the way forward. The way you interact with a machine
is just different to how it was five or ten years ago.
Which makes sense as things become more graphical, or touch-based… The Microsoft ecosystem has been suppressing innovation for quite some time, and really was broke up by the time our friends from Apple introduced the tablet space. Because then, like that, it started giving these guys a run for there money. And now you can see PCs are
starting to transform a bit more. AMD
has been playing on the cheap end of notebooks. There was a time when you looked at Intel and you saw high performance products, and AMD was the opposite of it. Over the last 12 months we’ve been changing that perception. We now have some very, very cool high end products as well.
“There was a time when you looked at Intel and you saw high performance products, and AMD was the opposite of it. Over the last 12 months we’ve been changing that perception.”
Bernd Lienhard, AMD
But how much do people care about what chip their Xbox or laptop has in it? Are people actually making buying decisions on that? There are a lot of ways people make decisions, one of those in online research. As a company we’re beefing up our online presence as in the past it wasn’t really very good. We’re catering our messaging more to tech savvy people.
Would you describe this as a comeback period for AMD? We’ve proven over the last three quarters we can make it, we can beat it (financial predictions), and the outlook for this quarter and the quarters to come are significantly up. There is a lot of excitement in the
company now. Sometime AMD felt like it had been beaten in the past, but there’s a different hype in the company now. There’s success, market share gains, financial stability. There’s a lot of good momentum, and if you feel good, things are going to happen.
September PCR 15
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