AMD's PIC Is Not Dead

AMD has recently announced that they will put an end to PIC. It seems that the $100 PC from AMD wasn't so successful after all, so AMD decided to stop it right after they stopped the Geode CPU factories. However, later, AMD declared that they won't stop building cheap PCs for the developing countries, but instead, they will develop only the models for such computers. The goal of this new plan is to become chip and design seller rather than a system integrator.

EETimes says that "The company decided it will not sell to service providers complete systems like PIC which it said was too generic to serve diverse market sectors." Whether this is the actual reason behind PIC's disappearance or not is hard to tell but AMD's new idea might prove just right under the actual circumstances. AMD's Chief Innovation Officer Billy Edwards adds the following: "We are going back to our core competency of selling chips. We will make reference designs and work with OEMs and ODMs, but we will not do an end product."

And there you have it: PIC is not dead; it's just that AMD won't manufacture them anymore. But that doesn't mean that they won't make money out of PIC anymore. Especially because the new laptop designs will incorporate Geode LX and NX series CPUs. Interestingly enough, AMD also supplies Geode CPUs to the OLPC project. You could say that they are using both projects in order to make money. And perhaps that's the exact reason behind AMD's idea not to produce PIC but sell the design to others. That way they could end up with a healthy profit without having to compete with OLPC's laptop. And if such a project were to fail, they won't be the ones take the blame.