AMD Makes Risky Move Toward ‘Ambidextrous’ Strategy
Saturday, February 4th, 2012While not leaping into the arms of ARM, AMD is hinting it’s less wedded to the traditional x86 architecture that is its history.
AMD calls its strategy “ambidextrous” and says it builds on the company’s current strengths in x86 and graphics products while embracing other technology and intellectual property the company hopes will differentiate its products in a competitive market.
The Intel rival sees its future in HSA, or heterogeneous system architecture. AMD outlined its strategy at its Financial Analyst Day this week.
“AMD’s strategy capitalizes on the convergence of technologies and devices that will define the next era of the industry,” said Rory Read, president and CEO of AMD. “The trends around consumerization, the cloud and convergence will only grow stronger in the coming years.”
Repositioning AMD
As Read sees it, AMD has a unique opportunity to take advantage of a key industry inflection point as executives continue the work they started last year to reposition the company. Read says the new strategy will “help AMD embrace the shifts occurring in the industry, marrying market needs with innovative technologies, and become a consistent growth engine.”
A major part of the plan includes HSA, which promises software developers a way to program APUs by combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the graphics processing unit — all while offering high-bandwidth access to memory at low power. AMD is working to make HSA an open industry standard for the developer community.
“The battle plan that Read is articulating isn’t to go head-to-head with Intel. He’s suggesting going around Intel,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, who attended AMD’s Financial Analyst Day. “Read was talking about going where the market was going, using whatever technologies they have access to in order to get there, including both x86 and ARM. You had to read between…
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