AMD and Intel's channel differences

THERE WERE NINETY SEVEN tables booked at last night's Channel Awards, sponsored by AMD and held in a vast plastic tent in Battersea Park, south of Old Father Thames. As each table holds 10 people, the sum isn't hard to do.

And these were all important people in the vendor, distribution and system community, with only a light sprinkling of hacks and hackettes so as not to frighten the horses.

The roll call included Cisco, LG Electronics, Dixons, Comet, Compaq, HP, Kingston Technology, Nvidia and many, many others.

For the first time, Intel also booked a table and to me this suggests that perhaps the firm has realised it needs to do a lot more to win hearts and minds of channel players.

Just chatting to a number of the guests, who we won't name here, it is evident first that the channel in the UK at least has a lot of respect for AMD and what it's doing.

The relationship between vendors and distributors is often fraught - to put it diplomatically - and although from time to time there's bother between both, no one appeared to have a bad word to say about AMD.

No one was badmouthing Intel either, it has to be said, but over at Table 38, we are assuming that the chip giant staff were taking notes, enjoying the entertainment and also picking up the same feeling we had.

One guest from a very large retail chain told us that in his view AMD's processors knocked the spots off the Pentium 4 in performance terms, and while it made good business sense to stock Intel kit as well as Athlon machines, he had no doubt which he would, at least privately, endorse.

No one, by the way, should get the idea from the above that we're pro-AMD and anti-Intel, because we can assure you we've had run ins with both the Great Satan of Tape Recorders and the Great Stan of Semiconductors.

But what seemed remarkable to us was that with such a tight marketing, staff and advertising budget compared to Intel, AMD is able to achieve such a warm fuzzy feeling from its customers and partners.

We don't think that all the warmth and fuzziness was down to the champagne and the jigging about on the dance floor later in the evening before the carriages arrived... µ

ONE DISTIE told me that the Celeron 900MHz is now down to less than $50 - pretty amazing. He also said that he felt AMD had a dud in the Duron, and it wasn't really worth the firm continuing with the line. By dud, he didn't mean in performance terms or anything like that - just that he wasn't shipping any real quantity of the parts compared to the Athlon XP bits.