Sends special Verdetrol pills to websites, jabs NVIDIA while it's at it

Feb 10, 2012 10:47 GMT  ·  By

Advanced Micro Devices has decided to use a rather unusual marketing tactic in order to raise awareness about its upcoming Cape Verde GPU and the Radeon HD 77xx video cards.

As this special website will be all too eager to show, the Sunnyvale, California-based company has begun sending pills to Internet websites.

They are not just any pills, though, but “natural performance enhancement” pills called “Verdetrol”.

In a double linguistic bonus, the name of the medication not only refers to the Cape Verde Southern Islands GPU, but is also a stealth jab at NVIDIA.

“Verde” means green, which is the color of NVIDIA's company logo. It also bears noting that “Verde” is the name NVIDIA uses for its notebook graphics drivers.

The contents of the pill tube are the truly important thing: precisely 28 green/blue pills, signifying the 28nm manufacturing process.

Also, Advanced Micro Devices advertises the Verdetrol as the GHz edition, fully confirming that the Cape Verde will work at 1 GHz.

Up to now, no graphics card ever had a clock speed working at that frequency, not without overclocking on the part of OEMs or enthusiasts anyway.

Furthermore, the “Never Settle” slogan has become “Never Settle for Average Performance”.

AMD will upload a promotional video of the Verdetrol soon, perhaps confirming more of the info that leaks have already exposed.

Speaking of leaks, the specifications of the Radeon HD 7750 and HD 7770 were fully uncovered just hours ago (check them out here).

Finally, to be fair, we can't, in good conscience, say that this is a unique marketing stunt. We are fairly certain that NVIDIA did something similarly pill-based a couple of years back and there is Imbicillin to consider as well.

One should be sure to carefully read the prescription on AMD's or NVIDIA's medicine before committing their PCs (or themselves) to the treatment.