Taiwan’s “Electronic Times†recently exclusively interviewed Dirk Meyer, AMD’s CEO, to discuss AMD’s future development strategies and product lines. Q: What are the benefits of splitting manufacturing operations into Global Foundries for AMD?
A: AMD has become a non-factory semiconductor company. It no longer needs to manage its own factories. Therefore, it can devote more time and energy to R&D and marketing, and effectively increase the return on investment of intellectual property.
In order to accelerate AMD's response to market demand, we have merged the CPU and GPU divisions and formed a new products group led by Rick Bergman. As a result, AMD can evaluate all products from a more comprehensive perspective, achieve optimal use of intellectual property, and release products more quickly.
At the same time, we also have a customer group to assist our customers, as well as marketing and product pricing, in order to respond quickly to customer needs.
AMD CPUs are mostly outsourced to GlobalFoundries, and GPUs and chipsets are outsourced to TSMC. We also plan to outsource APUs to GlobalFoundries (translation: 32nm Llano).
Q: Can you talk about AMD APU plans?
A: The Fusion APU can be used for netbooks, laptops, and desktops. We are manufacturing engineering samples and are scheduled to ship in the first half of 2011.
As for market observers' concerns about whether APU affects the discrete graphics market, we believe the impact will be limited because GPUs in Fusion products are positioned in the mainstream market, and high-performance PCs for high-end market consumers still need a discrete graphics card.
Q: How does AMD see Intel and NVIDIA entering the tablet and smartphone markets?
A: We do not have plans to enter the smart phone market because there are already many manufacturers in this industry. We believe that we should focus on our dominant industries, such as notebooks, desktops, and servers.
As for the tablet, according to our many years of observation, I believe that it has the opportunity to achieve explosive growth after the price drops below 299 US dollars, but now the tablet is just a supplement to the traditional PC.
AMD is not the first company to enter the industry, but if we find a suitable business opportunity, I believe we can quickly follow up.
Q: The shipment of netbooks has begun to decline. Why does AMD have to actively enter?
A: We are still optimistic about the Internet market. According to internal data, netbook shipments in 2011 can still grow by 20%. The traditional notebooks are similar, which means that the netbook shipments will reach 20-30 million next year.
Because of the low price, netbooks can only provide consumers with the most basic functions, such as browsing the web, sending and receiving emails, but consumers still need them to achieve more functions, such as multimedia playback and game playing. AMD has provided several sets of ultra-thin notebook platforms that are positioned in what we call the "Super Mobility" market. We also believe that we can achieve rapid growth.
The ultra-thin platform allows AMD's partners to develop notebooks that outperform traditional netbooks while still maintaining a lower price. Lenovo has already launched two series of this platform products, ThinkPad Edge, ThinkPad X100e.
In 2011, AMD will release the new processor (architecture) Bobcat, which is mainly for the netbook market, but it can also be used for smaller devices such as tablets.
From a technical point of view, the use of Bobcats for tablet computers is no hindrance, but the specific choice is still the manufacturer. Although the power consumption of our CPU has been able to meet the needs of tablet users, we are still carefully evaluating the investment in the tablet machine market.
Q: What is AMD's plan for cloud computing?
A: In the face of fierce competition, our server processor market share has maintained its own level in the past year. We believe there is an opportunity to gain more shares in the future.
We have released the 12-core Manikul processor in the first half of this year, namely the Opteron 6000 series platform and the 8-core Opteron 4000 series.
Our strategic approach provides customers with all different levels of products to meet their needs at a low price. We believe that this strategy can perfectly meet the market demand, especially cloud computing has become the standard application of the IT market.