During its Analyst day, AMD’s CEO Rory Read said that his company would “leverage its PC chips technology” to enter the tablet market. He also said that AMD would stay away from smartphones at the moment, because it is a “low-margin” business in his opinion (interestingly, Qualcomm has posted record revenues). Overall, it seems obvious that AMD is banking on Windows 8 when it comes to tablets.
AMD’s hope is that in a low(er)-power environment, it will be able to outdo its archrival Intel, which has demonstrated a viable “medfield” X86 chip for smartphones. Both companies are trying to enter a space where ARM currently dominates. Windows 8 will help both AMD and Intel in the tablet market because they can run legacy Windows X86 code, which is often critical for device drivers for example. However, keep in mind that Windows 8 will also run on ARM systems
But despite the overall bullishness suitable to an Analyst presentation, AMD has much work to do to gain market share in the tablet business. First of all, Windows 8 has to be successful, and secondly, it will be interesting to see how potent ARM-based Windows 8 system are going to be. This will be the first time that both platforms compete directly in the same market. It looks like X86 and ARM will finally collide. [AMD Analyst day site and presentations]
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