It can't be fun trying to compete with a company like Intel. If you look at the $50Bn worth of engineering, marketing and sales muscle the sponsors of tomorrow has at its disposal, then look over at AMD's $6.5Bn revenues, you you get an idea of the scale of the challenge. At last night's PC Retail awards, something happened. Something quite extraordinary. KitGuru dons a penguin suit to investigate.

Back in the days of the original FX processors, AMD was the darling of the UK channel. Dell and co were not interested in AMD, so the Athlon range provided the small, local system builder and store with something to fight against the global corporates.

Recently, that tide has turned. AMD needed to grow past four years of posting $4Bn and so has pushed harder and harder for big orders from the multi-nationals. With that push well and truly in place, there was always the chance that the UK channel would feel ignored and left behind. But is that the case?

PC Retail is the UK's leading channel magazine – by a country mile. It is delivered to every major UK purchasing decision maker on a regular basis. Add in the web site itself, and you end up with around 80,000 Brits who make money out of the IT industry reading what Matt Grainger, Mat Bettinson & co write each month.

Every year, the whole of the UK tech buying industry votes on the companies they feel have done best in the UK. Not necessarily with ‘reeal' customers – but the people who buy for the major corporations and high street stores. So, when they all sat down to get lubed last night, who did they vote for? Which companies got the special loving from the most important people in the UK channel?

While distributors like Entatech and MicroP were polishing their shiny awards, the announcer began to announce the winner of the Component Vendor of the Year. With the list of finalists including Arctic, Kingston, PNY, Gigabyte, Asus and – yes – Intel itself, you'd be forgiven for being as surprised as anyone when AMD was called forward to collect the PC Retail channel award.

With unbridled glee, AMD's Regional Sales Manager Craig Connell said “This is a fantastic achievement for my team. We are so happy that our customers realise and appreciate how much work we have put into developing the channel. This give us great encouragement”.

KitGuru says: It's nice when people you work with have a secret vote and decide you're the nicest company they know. If you believe in competition, then you will be rooting for AMD to be able to turn this channel interest into more sales for 2012. If you're an Intel fan boi, you probably won't care what PC Retail readers think.

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