The secret of AMD’s recent success: An interview with John Byrne

1. AMD hits record sales2. Fusion is a game-changer3. What about CPU and GPU4. Can AMD win in the mobile space5. Is Fusion late to the party?6. View All Pages

“We have already shipped more than 1 million AMD Fusion APUs”

While the battle for high-end desktop graphics with nVidia has been a close-fought affair, the battle for high-end CPU sales has been completely one sided. From the outside, AMD has appeared to be doing the right thing. Focus on the larger chunk of the market and see what battles can be won there. It seems to have generated a huge jump in sales for the first time in many years.

We asked Byrne about 2010.

“2010 was a really strong year for AMD”, he said. “Across our entire business with APU shipments in Q4 totalling over one million units and in the component space, we’ve continued to deliver a strong line-up in both our graphics and product lines”.

With processors, it seems that more cores is better, “AMD Phenom 6-core CPUs delivered even more performance in the enthusiast space, while our commitment to price performance has enabled AMD to make quad-core CPUs even more affordable”.

Byrne's background is graphics, so we'd expect him to be confident about the DX11 space, “Our Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards introduce unprecedented levels of game performance, best-of-breed energy efficiency, and an unmatched feature set, including the ‘must-see' AMD EyeFinity technology”.

So how many of these products have actually been sold into the global market on Byrne's watch?

“As of the end of Q4 2010, we have shipped more than 35 million DirectX 11-capable GPUs and over 1 million DirectX 11-capable APUs”, said Byrne.

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