20 April
2001
AMD,
once the "little engine that could", is now a force
to be reckoned with. This past week, AMD posted another positive
earnings quarter. But they are not content to sit on that
good news...they are looking for more and that is what the
Team AMD Tech Tour is all about. They are speaking to system
builders, evangelizing the gospel of AMD.
This past Thursday, Team AMD made a stop in Philadelphia.
There were about 400 people present and the majority of those
were system builders and OEM's. AMD brought with them some
of their partners like Asus, MSI, Microsoft, NVIDIA and DFI.
Part 2 of this feature will cover those partners and their
latest wares including DDR motherboards. Oh, and believe the
hype, the GeForce3 looks even more incredible live.
For
people who liked to win things, this show was incredible.
Prizes included a 19" NEC monitor, Windows 2000, motherboards
galore, video cards and 1GHz Athlons. Unfortunately, I came
away empty handed...doh!
Part
1 of this feature will cover the Sales and Marketing Presentation
and the Technical Presentation. If want to skip the corporate
fluff, just jump to the Technical
page.
Sales
and Marketing Presentation
This
past week, AMD announced a 9% increase in profits while the
industry as a whole is struggling. They also announced that
they had gained another 4% market share from Intel. While
their biggest gains have come from the consumer market, AMD
is out to prove they belong in the business market. They talked
about things like TCO, Financial Security and their Technology
Innovation. One thing they focused on was that their value
and performance line of processors both used the same platform
(Socket A); the competiton can not make that claim. Consequently
it adds to AMD's scalability - you can easily move from a
Duron to a Thunderbird if you have the need for more power.
Though
it wasn't a major point in their presentation, AMD reminded
the audience of their 30 years in IC design and that Flash
Memory contributes a major portion of their sales.
Part
of the presentation included a little comparison of how the
Duron was built on 1999 architecture while the Celeron was
built on 1995 technology. They also tossed in a little benchmark
lovin' showing the merits of the Athlon over the Pentium 4.
While
it was informative, the Sales Presentation paled in comparison
to the Technical Presentation.
