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 need to engineer a behavioural change in consumers”

KitGuru challenged Byrne on just how long it's taken to get Fusion to market. We said that it feels like it's 6 months late.

“I couldn’t disagree with you more”, said Byrne. “In fact we launched the AMD Fusion APU at a time when computing users are increasingly gravitating to multi-media, HD and video content, and are the first company to release a product that has DirectX 11 graphics on the same die with world-class x86 technology. It is important not to lose sight on the significance of this new product and the effect its launch is poised to have on the industry”.

Somehow we feel he won't let us.

“In technology terms, the industry hasn’t seen anything as revolutionary since the launch of a dual-core CPU”, claims Byrne. But he recognises that AMD can't just ‘put it out there' and hope for the best.

“As the architect of this new technology, it is our role to support the development of an entire AMD Fusion eco-system, ensuring we support the development of new software to fully capitalise on the APU, work with our board partners and notebook customers to help them realise the potential of this technology. But also, we need to engineer a behavioural change in consumers to educate them in the benefits of our AMD Fusion technology”, said Byrne.

You can normally tell how serious a company is, by whether it's prepared to back its programmes with money. Byrne took the opportunity to highlight the AMD Fusion Fund Programme, where AMD will invest to help developers create the applications of tomorrow.

He believes that the platform is already working, “We plan to build on the initial unprecedented demand and positive market acceptance that we’ve seen to-date. I’m genuinely excited about the number of customers as well as the broad range of form factors and applications we’ll see in the market this year”, said Byrne.

There's a natural tendency to think that cheaper systems are going to be more attractive to developing markets. With China replacing Japan as the world's second largest economy, we asked Byrne about the fast-moving regional markets.

“Our range of products offers numerous solutions that are right for different regional requirements”, said Byrne. “Across the world, hundreds of millions of people are now creating, interacting with and sharing visual content. We’ve organised our business around delivering superior technology at competitive prices. AMD is the only company who can provide a full range of products for all of these requirements, leading-edge computing AND graphics processing power”.

“Wherever you are in the world, if you want the most vivid digital computing experience in a PC, the answer is AMD”, said Byrne.

We finished off by asking Byrne for his view on a Steve Jobs opinion. The basic premise is that spending too much time on cost-cutting does not really help your business. That in the world of modern technology, you need to out-innovate the other guy, to try and make his intellectual property and physical stock ‘irrelevant'. Essentially, can AMD provide the kind of quantum leap that will allow it to completely out-manoeuvre the competition?

“We already have!”, exclaimed Byrne. “AMD Fusion is a game changer. Desktops that once required a multi-chip solution or laptops that had to be big and heavy in order to provide significant computing and graphics power – are now a thing of the past. Even though this new technology has only just been launched, we're already feeling a positive ripple effect through the market and AMD Fusion APUs will enable users to do things with PCs they’ve never been able to do before, in the smallest/coolest form factors anyone has ever seen”.

KitGuru says: Confident words from AMD's Corporate Vice President, but given that he's just helped AMD achieve annual revenues of $6.49 billion, up 20% year-on-year, maybe Byrne's earned the right to feel confident. We've already seen January's initial reference-design AMD Fusion boards give way to smooth, overclocked designs from companies like Asus – and the 6900 series is as good as any graphics card series on the market, with a 6990 to follow. On that basis, we're only waiting for Bulldozer to complete the set – then AMD can say that it's truly competing in every space.

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