AMD spots mix with ATI stripes

AMD blitzed financial analysts yesterday with an array of its top executives seeking to put out the message that all is well at the firm, and the ATI integration of its business is pretty advanced.

Dirk Meyer kicked off the session by saying that the industry was formerly obsessed with a "maniacal focus on driving single thread processes". There's also something maniacal about driving too far ahead with multi-cores, he suggested. The ATI takeover has injected thousands of engineers with experience of fabless tech into the AMD model.

The AMD brand will be the master brand but the ATI brand will still be prominent, he said. AMD has already completely integrated the sales force and now has a single supply chain and manufacturing model. Meyer's tie was unremarkable.

Henri Richard, top sales and marketing guy at AMD wore a somewhat remarkable tie. The main thrust of his chat was that it was important for AMD to continue the push into the commercial market. AMD has started building a commercial channel, and it took its retail model pioneered in the US and Europe globally. That was working well in countries like China and Brazil. He didn't mention India.

Former ATI CEO Dave Orton wore a truly remarkable striped tie. He wanted to take his jacket off and got everyone in the room to stand up for 30 seconds to get their blood flowing again. Everyone stood up so for 30 seconds it was completely impossible to see Dave Orton and his remarkable tie.

Hector Ruiz' somewhat striped tie was not very remarkable, and the Q&A that followed was pretty unremarkable too. AMD confirmed it will lose some Intel business from the ATI merger, the quad core chips will come out in the middle of 2007, a new mobile component would be focused on better power efficiency with only a little performance increase, while there will be three or four different variants of Fusion when it emerges. µ