14 DAY TRIAL // Now that AMD is so very close to releasing its latest mobile accelerated processing units, you would think that the company would be courting makers of all types of tablets, but that isn't the case, according to CEO Rory Read and Senior Vice President Lisa Su.
During the earnings call that AMD held with financial analysts last week, the company leaders revealed something curious about their plans for the near future.
Specifically, they said that they did not intend to challenge Intel at all on the low-end tablet market, and the same goes for “Android on ARM.”
Not that Advanced Micro Devices would have that much to challenge even if it did try its hand at that particular segment.
The Intel Quark is a recent development after all, and the other Atom chips haven't carved that big a slice of the tablet industry.
No, AMD would only have ARM-based slates to contend with, and on the low-end market, they probably won't be threatened by anything for a while, not when ARM chips are still more efficient than x86.
So AMD is betting on the high-end tablet market instead, where it promises to offer slates with PC-like performance.
This would actually pit it directly against the range of slates designed with NVIDIA's Tegra 4 and Tegra K1 tablets, which would fit its stance perfectly.
In theory, AMD could try to steal some low-end tablet share from ARM, like Intel is doing in China, but that won't happen. Besides, Intel is paying Shenzen-based tablet manufacturers $100 cumulative million / €72 million to persuade them to use its chips. This is a tactic called contra-revenue, and is one that AMD doesn't want to engage in.
Although all of this does show that AMD's general tactic is a picture of pretty sharp contrasts. On the one hand, it's not bothering with the high-end CPU market anymore. On the other, it's shying away from the low-end mobile front and aiming high there instead.
Then again, it's not like the Beema, with its power draw of 10-25W and 2-4 cores Puma, can do much in low-end products. Mullins is better, with its power consumption of 2W, but it, too, has 2-4 Puma cores. Add to that GCN (graphics core next) stream processors and you really have too much processing and graphics prowess for low-end chips.
We'll have to wait until Computex before we see what tablet design wins AMD has scored though (because yes, there are some).