AMD promises to look after the channel

FORMER EMPLOYEES OF ATI stressed that the graphics part of the company was just as committed to the channel as AMD was.

John Byrne, senior vice president of sales at ATI that was and who now works for AMD, said that AMD is just as committed to the channel as it used to be.

Next up, Rick Bergman, also a former ATI employee said that as part of the Greater AMD, convergence was the name of the game.

One marketing employee here in Tunisia spent much of his time ruthlessly purging anyone wearing an ATI logo on his or her shirt. This caused a certain amount of disgruntlement amongst a few diehards, but most just swallowed their pride and became part of what Bergman described as the Greater AMD.

Next up were technical presentations on some future announcement AMD will make about chips which are under embargo and or NDA, so we had to make our excuses and left them to it.

So far the celebrity of the show is Richard Huddy, ex-Nvidia and now ex-ATI and very much an AMD corporate player. He belted out a message, in front of the vast and very impressive Ministry of the Interior Building which veered wildly between the risque and the ribald. His talk amused the journalists so much that they applauded - we're sure you'll agree this is an ATI Radeon First.

To the sound of Huddy, swifts and the muezzin shouting out the call to prayer, we had to make our excuses and leave, only to find David Ross from hexus.net interfering with the native Yamaha Tunisian players by quite insultingly attempting to play chopsticks. He's just come back from Beijing you know.

Ross suggested that if you are in a Sheraton hotel anything goes.

This poor Danish hack was at Beijing
And the strain is beginning to show

We tried to ignore the belly dancer but this was hard because she kept bumping into us while we steadfastly gazed across the divide between the Sheraton and the impressive Ministry of the Interior building, where the lights never seem to go out. There are quite a few hacks here who were at IDF Beijing too, some of them like Charlie are looking a bit frayed at the edges, but there are very few indeed who have made the grand X86 tour like your humble INQ correspondent with two weeks in India courtesy of Via, one week in Beijing courtesy of Intel and two days in Tunisia courtesy of AMD.

Thanks god there are so few players in the X86 industry these days. Perhaps Nvidia will take us to Antarctica, where we can chill out after being toasted and feasted in three different continents in as many weeks.

AND IN OTHER news the man from Sapphire got his non-working samples back this morning. He dismissed the suggestion that the story we wrote last night was anything to do with it. His competitor is still waiting for his non working samples to be freighted in from HK, to the best of our knowledge.

TOP PR GUY Chris Evenden had to say repeatedly to the assembled hackettes and hacks "no photographs please", reitering what the be-suited John Byrne said. We had to protest mildly even though we weren't snapping ourselves, to point out that we were being filmed and photographed by a whole team of ATI/AMD snappers without our permission. Haven't they heard of personal IP yet? µ