14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Advanced Micro Devices definitely doesn't plan to let the tablet market slip through its grasp, having decided to push its Fusion technology in this segment as arduously as possible.
When looking at how Advanced Micro Devices is dealing with the tablet industry, one might draw the conclusion that it is trying to avoid what happened with netbooks.
AMD didn't offer much, if anything, in terms of mobile processors until last year, at least not something that could seriously challenge Intel.
This, among other things, means that it missed out on the sales growth it could have experienced had it designed s chip or two for netbooks.
Tablets are, now, proving to have a growth potential similar to that of entry-level laptops, and AMD is definitely not keen on missing out this time.
Having delivered Fusion-based APUs (accelerated processing units) suited for such machines, the Sunnyvale, California-based outfit hopes to see tablets adopting them as well, like the Acer Iconia W500 did, among others.
Of course, to have any success, it needs to make sure that operating systems are supported, and this extends to more than just Windows.
Apparently, the company will keep a close eye on MeeGo (although it doesn't have much faith in this platform) and will “investigate” Google's Android, according to an interview with X-bit Labs.
"As we look onto open-standards market, the Android certainly makes a tremendous amount of sense,”said Neal Robison, senior director of content and application support at AMD.
“That is something we will be investigating as we take our Fusion architecture [into new markets] and we are able to create versions of this architecture for lower power environments that would work quite well for, perhaps, a tablet using this operating system."
"MeeGo is pretty interesting from a Linux perspective, and I think we need to see a little bit more market acceptance.”