AMD on its new direction, the iPad, and the transformation of the traditional PC

In a bid to reverse losses, AMD is looking to new areas outside of traditional PCs – most notably gaming.
We talked to Bernd Lienhard – corporate vice president and general manager of client division global business units – about the changing world of tech, Apple vs Microsoft, and a ‘different hype’ within the chip maker…
PCR: So we’re told AMD is a changing company – what’s it changing into?
Lienhard: We wanted to use the brand to move into adjacent markets, and one of the first ones we picked was consoles. We’ve been able to secure the three major platforms: Playstation, Nintendo and Microsoft Xbox. All three major consoles in the world are now based on AMD technology.
The cool thing about it is, since all three games consoles are now based on AMD architecture, there’s only a few gaming engines out there, so when you’re looking to do a port for the machines they have to be very tailored to our architecture.
All the major games and games engines are all going to be tied to our architecture, which is fantastic because they are going to run significantly better on AMD machines than anything else, whether that’s Nvidia or whoever.
We’re going to take that console dominance and take it into the cloud. Think of the console business as a new building block for diversifying and transforming AMD.
In the last quarter we believe about 20 per cent of our revenue came from the non-traditional (non-PC) space. And in the next few years that’s probably going be more like 50 per cent. So the AMD you used to know is probably not the same company anymore.
Is that because generally in the emphasis in tech has been moving away from traditional PCs?
It is – but still a 300 million-unit PC market is not a small one. But there’s always room for us to transform, change and grow.
This is not saying we’re going to abandon the classic PC space, but we are leveraging transitions within the market.
And your most recent financials were described as better than expected, what’s doing well at the moment?
We did beat guidance quite a bit, the numbers came in higher than even the top-rate predictions.
One of the biggest factors was computing space, up 12 per cent which is relatively big. And there was a share increase last quarter, so I know our friends at Intel probably aren’t going to be that happy. We achieved a relatively brutal step up in unit shipments.
You can see from a thrust into the mobility space, which is mainly notebooks and tablets, that we have the strongest and broadest portfolio. You can see my team pushing more aggressively into the mobility space, because that’s where a lot of the transformation is going to happen. We have strong guidance going forward – a 20 per cent revenue increase next quarter, in line with the Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
When you come to a company you want to see some leadership – because it’s very difficult to compete in this world if you’re a ‘me too’. Our ATi Radeon brand is the best on the planet. And we’re using this IP and dropping it into the processors as well.
For decades the CPU was seen as the dominating factor in how powerful a PC was. But these days it’s a combination of graphics as well as CPU horsepower. This is why we think the APU (accelerated processing unit) is the way forward.
The way you interact with a machine is just different to how it was five or ten years ago.

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