The 4-platform Strategy
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In the press materials supplied to Amdmb.com by AMD, they outlined there coming 4-platform or 4-tier strategy for the next year or so in a detailed fashion. The first step is for AMD to build on their already strong desktop computing foundation. AMD is determined to increase their market share in the home PC market as well as maintain the strong position in the eyes of the consumer and their desktop purchases.An area that AMD is knowingly lacking on is the commercial business front. The large majority of businesses are run off of one of various Intel platforms and that leaves a very high-profit sector of the marketplace out of reach to AMD. In order to infiltrate this area AMD will have to begin pushing their products on the large distributors from which the majority of businesses receive their merchandise. Companies such as Compaq, Dell and CDW are high AMD’s list.
Second, AMD is hoping to recover a dramatic loss of market share in the mobile computing platform. The announcement of the Athlon 4 in May was their first step at this goal. In hopes of establishing the Athlon 4 processor as the standard for performance notebooks, AMD is building upon innovative technologies such as PowerNow! to differentiate themselves as the market leader.
Third, the topic of today’s announcement, AMD will debut multiprocessing platforms for high-performance workstations. Using the momentum that the current Athlon processor has developed, AMD hopes to push their proven performance to extend into the 2-way workstation environment. The tools that will allow them to reach this goal are the Athlon MP processor and the AMD-760 MP chipset.
On a much broader scale, the last of the 4 tiers that AMD wishes to roll out is to introduce innovative multi-way server solutions. Their initial offering into this market will also come from today’s announcement of the Athlon MP processor and AMD-760 MP chipset. Further on down the road, nearing the second half of 2002, AMD will extend its reach by using the x86-64 technology with the “Hammer” products to enable seamless 32- and 64-bit computing. The eventual goal of this technology is to bring about 4- and 8-way enterprise solutions with the ‘Hammer’ family of products. This market is based off a huge profit margin and is what AMD needs the most in order to topple Intel as the largest processor manufacturer.
