AMD gears up for a good year

AMD'S EUROPEAN CHANNEL director Andrew Buxton is gearing up for a tough battle with arch-rival Intel this year. He reckons the gloves will come off on April 9th when the price cuts someone leaked to the world will kick in.

What the channel wants is aggressive pricing and decent product availability and that's what AMD will deliver from April onwards, says Buxton.

"From April 9th our pricing will be more aggressive and we'll have a lot of product,” he says. “Our 65 nanometre production is now fully ramped up and we've got good products coming up. I'm quite enthusiastic at the moment. You don't mind working hard when you feel you're getting somewhere.”

AMD is showing off its freshly-minted 690 chipset here in Brum, with four new “platforms” delivered courtesy of its ATI acquisition. For Buxton, the offering is the “highest-performing integrated chipset” out there. After a period of inevitable “distraction” that any merger will create, he feels things are settling down and the product from the “new” AMD is beginning to come through.

“ATI gives us full control of the platform,” he says. And so on all fronts, he reckons AMD is gearing up for a good year. He says the 690 chipset has gone down brilliantly. “I've not heard a word about any problems with it - from anybody,” he says.

With its upcoming challenge in bringing out ATI's much-debated and belated R600 graphics wizardry, the old AMD will be feeling its way into its new market place. While, back on more familiar territory, there will be Barcelona for which the company has very high hopes in the server space. Buxton was able to help us understand the usefulness of having the quad-core server chip socket-compatible with the current dual-core offering.

It's not only about the most demanding users swapping out the chips, it's equally about having introduced a platform throughout the channel so that any inevitable teething problems are ironed out beforehand. "It's a mature infrastructure that we're bringing Barcelona into," He says.

“We had the pain last year and this year we'll reap the benefit." µ