AMD has Vision

AMD IS SHOWING OFF its Vision branding on laptop systems, which is supposed to show the great unwashed how to tell if their machines can run certain tasks, particularly video.

The move is supposed to be an answer to Chipzilla's age-old "Intel inside" marketing programme, which was so successful that it was never copied by Intel's smaller rival.

However it looks like the "Vision" marketing scheme plays down the fact it is AMD in favour of what a customer can actually do with the machine. It means that the OEM brand will become the PC's selling point. Obviously this should make AMD a bit more popular with OEMs, which is always a good thing from Chimpzilla's point of view.

Today AMD plans to launch"Tigris", its second-generation ultrathin notebook platform. The company dropped the Congo name because people in the region got upset about it, whereas apparently the name of one of the rivers in Babylon is considered less politically incorrect.

AMD is expected to announce its Fusion Media Explorer application and Fusion Utility for Mobility, a power-management application.

AMD will use three brands initially. These include a basic "Vision" brand, "Vision Premium" and a "Vision Ultimate" brand, all timed to make an appearance when Microsoft ships Windows 7 on 22nd October.

According to V3, Vision laptops can manage everyday tasks such as browsing and watching video online, while those labelled Vision Premium meet the hardware specifications for "media consumers" who watch high-definition video and convert videos to watch on a portable player, for example.

The Vision Ultimate brand, meanwhile, covers laptops with the highest specifications, capable of creating and editing high-definition video and playing 3D games.

There will also be a "Vision Black" brand that will roll out early next year. We don't know what it will do, and we would have thought that 'Black' and 'Vision' don't really work that well together as you can't usually see anything in the dark.

The logic of the marketing is based on the belief that people don't talk about the technical specifications of their chips when they are talking to their friends. Nor do they mention who makes the chips, apparently. All they want to know is does it play games, display videos or manage high-definition content?

The Vision platform will have support for Windows 7 features such as High DPI resolution to deliver more readable text plus Direct2D acceleration of graphics. Premium and Ultimate laptops will ship with plug-ins that let media authoring tools make use of ATI Stream technology, which unlocks the power of the graphics processor chip to speed complex calculations.

Actually the systems will be based on Turion II or Turion II Ultra Dual-Core mobile processors with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 graphics, while the second-generation ultrathin platform includes Turion Neo X2 or Athlon Neo X2 processors with ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics.

Apparently AMD thinks you don't care about any of that though. µ