14 DAY TRIAL // AMD is reportedly instructing its channel partners to convince users into buying more powerful hardware than they actually need. According to the company, the practice is perfectly legal and has nothing to do with anti-competitive actions; instead, it is based on good technical advice.
Giuseppe Amato, director of value propositions for EMEA at AMD, claims that the new policy adopted by the processor manufacturer is the company's response to the market's demands. However, he admits that both resellers and system builders need to encourage their customers to pick a more expensive and better product than a low-end one.
"We want customers to upgrade to the ?799 product rather than the ?599. And if they were already thinking about the ?799 one, let us get them up to ?999," he said.
Amato also said that the company is promoting its 780G flagship chipset in conjunction with its dual-, triple- and quad-core processors, in order to match the needs of a diversified market with low-end and high-end users.
"If someone says they like watching films, but nothing else, we can give them a triple-core. If they like making films and storing them on BluRay, the reseller knows to give them a quad-core. If they are a serious gamer, the reseller should move them up to 790 chipset."
More than that, Amato claims that the company's products can suit the needs of users as they diversify their options on an evolutive basis. "At any stage, resellers could upgrade a user from a triple-core to a quad-core," he said. The CPU upgrade, for instance can be performed at no extra cost, since tri- and quad-core chips share the same Socket AM2+ architecture.
Despite the company's allegations, market analysts still claim that this type of flexibility won't help AMD become a real annoyance to its competitor Intel. According to Eszther Morvay, senior research analyst at IDC, AMD has lost an impressive amount of market share on the mobile market, where the chip manufacturer has a negligible presence.