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Without doubt, AMD’s least successful arm in the past has been workstation.
Sure, they have produced interesting products, but the width and depth of nVidia's penetration into this area is truly impressive.
Specific example?
In each of the past 5 years, Hollywood has voted for a special effects Oscar at the Academy Awards, by choosing among 5 contenders.
That’s 25 films in recent history. All of the winners were powered by Quadro, which is logical given that every film that was short-listed used nVidia's platform.
Byrne thinks this is changing.
“In terms of workstation sales, 2013 was a great year for AMD”, he begins. “We were seeing a split around the 90:10 level a couple of years ago, but now AMD has picked up an additional 10% of the market to give us an 80:20 split. We think this trend will continue”.
“To succeed here, you need 5 things”, he said. “Number one is the hardware, closely followed by fully certified software and then you’re ready for number 3, design wins, picking up significant business from serious customers”.
“Extending your success gives you item four, which is having the right people in the right regions and, finally, at number five you need local field application engineers who can provide grass roots support where it's required”, Byrne told us.
“We’re fully committed to doing this”, explained Byrne. “We'll have new hardware, which will have all of the required certifications. You will find more and more systems with FirePro on our customer’s websites”.
“All of this hard work brings momentum which, in turn, leads to better operational efficiency and increased quality all round”.
Speaking with John Byrne it's clear.
Not only does he thoroughly believe that AMD has a winning strategy in place, he is also sure that the organisation is executing on that strategy and that the company, overall, has the financial structure necessary to deliver.
KitGuru says: With more than 100 million APUs in the market already, the launch of Mantle as a new approach to graphics performance, the HSA plans that everyone expects to land soon, brand new FirePro technology launches that started with the W9100 and the ambidextrous strategy that has been tied down with ARM – AMD is clearly leading in a lot of markets. If you focus only on high-end desktop CPUs, then there's no doubting Intel's supremacy. Open up your definition to include other markets and the future certainly looks a lot rosier for AMD that it has done at any point in its recent past. We thank John Byrne for taking the time to speak with KitGuru.
Using a broader definition of ‘the market', do you feel that AMD is leading? Join more than 185,000 fellow KitGuru readers over on Facebook and let us know.
