Intel's 'unfair' market lead irks AMD

BANGALORE, INDIA: Even as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is all set to launch its Barcelona quad-core processor in the first quarter of 2008, the Sunnyvale-based chipmaker cried foul over rival Intel’s unfair lead in India and other markets.

“(In India) we cannot participate in 90 per cent of the government tenders, which ask for ‘Intel-based’ systems. We have taken up this issue with the government and we have received encouraging responses,” said Dirk Meyer, president and chief operating officer (COO) of AMD, in an exclusive interaction with CyberMedia.

However, Alok Ohrie, managing director of India operations, said that the company got a breakthrough in Karnataka, where the State government agreed to remove the ‘Intel-based system’ clause in tenders.

On the emerging markets, Meyer said that the company is getting good response. “We are having around 22 per cent market share in these (emerging) markets.”

Taking a dig at Intel

The AMD COO minced no words when it came to Intel, saying that the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker enjoyed an unfair monopoly.

“We are in the microprocessor business for the last 25 years. We started with second source business agreement with Intel. But unfairly they let the agreement down.”

Meyer lamented time lost in litigations. “We were tied-up with courts for 10 years. Finally, the court said that Intel violated the agreement, but it was too late. By that time, PC platform has taken off and Intel had the monopoly.”

He said Intel was forced to copy AMD’s 64-bit computer. “From mid-1990s, we started building our own products and we came out with the 64-bit computer, Intel was forced to copy.”

Slew of AMD products in 2008

Besides Barcelona, a series of launches is expected from AMD this year. The company is to rollout new versions of Phenom desktop processors and a new high-end graphics product, which will together make up the Spider platform in the first quarter.

In the second quarter of 2008, the company intends to launch new mainstream desktop platform for commercial and consumer needs using Phenom CPUs.

Additionally, next-generation platform for notebooks, code-named “Puma”, will also be launched. Based on AMD’s “Griffin” mobile processor and the mobile “RS780” chipset, the platform will feature M8X discrete GPUs (Graphic Processor Unit) and new technologies.

AMD earlier withheld the launch of Barcelona processor following glitches in the design. “We would be launching this (Barcelona) in the first quarter,” confirmed Meyer.

On the processor industry, Meyer said that the next decade will see more integrated system performing multiple tasks.

“One of the ideas we have is that future microprocessor is to take the general purpose GPU hardware and integrate in to the system and it is part of what we refer as Accelerated Processor Unit (APU). It is a collection of processor elements into one.”

On the ATI acquisition, Meyer said that the stock markets have undervalued the AMD market capitalization.

“AMD market capitalization is terrible under- valued. It was all part of the fluctuating stock market. We looked at long term decision in acquiring ATI rather than short term fluctuations,” he explained.

Meyer admitted that the year 2007 was not good for AMD. “The year 2007 was not very good for AMD and was not good for businesses, including AMD. In 2008, AMD will introduce new products as per the schedule.”

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