14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has lamentably failed in satisfying its power-hungry customers in its processor business during the last year. However, according to the chip manufacturer, it has got most of the United States public sector, including some segments of the country's army.
"Every branch of the military is using our stuff," says George Warren, AMD's director of public sector sales. "That's a dramatic change from 18 months ago." One of the mentioned branches is the US Air Force, and according to the company, AMD shipped about 70 percent of the winged unit's PC systems. AMD seems to have found its call on the Army market.
The chip manufacturer estimates that the combination of AMD and ATI's technologies fit like a glove in the military environment, especially in flight-simulation devices and three-dimensional mapping applications.
Warren explains the huge discrepancy between the sales in the public and the private sectors by the fact that the federal government cannot be biased by brands or affinities to a specific technology.
Instead, it has to consider which supplier offers the best performance and price ratio. Warren also claims that at the moment, AMD is the only manufacturer that offers the highest clock speeds at the lowest market prices.
Moreover, another strong aspect of AMD's technology is energy-efficiency. According to Rick Indyke, a business development manager for AMD's federal unit, data centers use more power in a year than the entire city of Las Vegas. AMD-based servers and desktop systems implement energy-efficiency technologies, to keep the electricity bill down.
"We're going to see more and more demand from the data centers, which is why we're focused on energy-efficient computing," continued Warren. He refused to give exact numbers regarding AMD's business with the federal government, but he said that government and education users account for roughly 20% to 30% of the company's business.
On the public sector, AMD's situation is gloomier, given the fact that the chip manufacturer managed to get 26% of the worldwide desktop market, while Intel snatched the rest of 74 percent. Notebook sales also sank, and brought the company a market share of 16 percent only.