AMD promises improved support

GOA: Having turned the heat on Intel by giving stiff competition and also managing to grab some market share from its arch rival, AMD has promised to increase and improve its support services in India.

The second largest chip manufacturer will go to market harping its endorsements received from Microsoft that all its operating systems, including Windows XP and Windows 2003, run well on AMD chips.

AMD also plans to make it public about its superiority over competing chips on benchmarks. Opteron beat Itanium on all 64-bit benchmarks, and Xeon on all 32-bit benchmarks.

The company gave these assurances to the CIOs gathered in Goa for the three day CIOL C Change event, who in turn agreed that if these promises do fructify, AMD could indeed give Intel a serious run for its money in India.

However these were of primary concerns to the gathered CIOs of leading Corporations regarding AMD to be just a cheaper replacement to that of its bigger rival, Intel. S Bhattacharya, CIO, HCL Technologies, whose sister company HCL Infosystems has an OEM partnership with AMD, started the debate in earnest. According to him, while AMD has set up several OEMs in the country, some issues concerning AMD pose a major concern to CIOs. Among them, one is the widespread perception that most Microsoft applications do not run on AMD processors; second is that though AMD scores over Intel on the price front, it is widely thought to be inferior to Intel and third, the general lack of service support, as most of the spare parts are not available.

Most of the other CIOs present at the gathering echoed Bhattacharya’s concerns. They concurred that the lack of portability of Microsoft applications into AMD processors is a major handicap and which force the hands of a CIO to opt for Intel despite AMD’s superiority in terms of throughput.

In the beginning of this year, AMD had recently launched the world first Windows compatible 64 bit chip for notebooks and laptops, Athlon 64 M. With this it becomes the only chip company in the world to have 64 bit processors for servers, desktops and notebooks.

CyberMedia News Service