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AMD misses the emerging subpar market

 

BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- There is a new trend in computing, and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is not on its bandwagon. I call the trend subpar computing.


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.

Let this market get away and only just now has released the Puma (actually what the company calls a "platform," combining a Griffon chip with an ATI graphics chip) for the laptop market. It took too many years for this chip to appear, and Intel Corp.'s Centrino 2 (which also combines functionality, 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 ultramobile 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., 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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