AMD Predicts A Watershed Year For Mobile Business

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker also has had positive talks with Lenovo, which manufactures the top-selling ThinkPad notebooks, about having the PC vendor adopt its processor technology, according to AMD executives.

“We had actually been talking to both Lenovo and IBM” before Lenovo bought IBM&s PC and ThinkPad business earlier this year, said Bahr Mahoney, division marketing manager for AMD&s mobile business. “And we were further along in those conversations, actually, with Lenovo.”

Executives at China-based Lenovo couldn&t be reached for comment.

AMD executives said they foresee a watershed year for the company&s mobile technology, which they expect will help AMD start competing head to head with Intel&s market-leading Centrino mobile platform. In addition to shipping the dual-core, low-power Turion mobile chip, AMD plans to roll out its Pacifica virtualization technology for its mobile platforms in the first half of next year, Mahoney said.

Talks with system builders also have led AMD to re-evaluate its distribution strategy, he added. The company is considering offering delivery of mobile processors to system builders in processor-in-a-box (PIB) shipments. AMD&s PIB offerings for workstations and servers are bar-coded and have three-year warranties, heat sinks, installation manuals and additional security features. Mahoney said packaging the mobile technology as a PIB would aid the acquisition process for smaller system builders.

While AMD has found some success in taking market share away from Intel in the desktop and server arenas, it has lagged in the notebook space, observers said.

“Intel went to the Centrino platform, and they&ve gotten a lot of mind share from that,” said Robert Shaffer, president of Source Micro, a Randolph, N.J.-based system builder. “I would probably imagine AMD would stand a very good chance of success on the notebook level—there is just such a demand right now, if they could jump in and be more price-aggressive, it certainly would be a good place for them.”