AMD outside
Having worked in the technology industry for some time, Kenyon has had the chance to look at AMD from the outside. We asked him what his relationship was like with AMD when he was at Sun Microsystems.
"AMD was present in a lot of our storage servers, in fact they basically monopolised our storage server business," said Kenyon. "The processor was effective, it was very inexpensive, it was designed into the machine effectively. AMD did something fundamentally different than Intel with the core architecture back then, which was optimised for I/O."
Kenyon said that was the extent of his professional relationship with AMD at Sun, so we asked him what his impressions have been of it as a consumer.
"As a consumer I always perceived AMD as the value brand, but now that I'm over here I think one of the things the company has always under-leveraged is the value messaging," said Kenyon. "This can be done better by showing people that it's not just about the price of the unit.
"In the component channel one of the things we hear a lot is that our tech support isn't quite as good as Intel's. It's not like we have to throw more money at that, I think we just have to be clever about how we support our partners, and so we've spent a fair bit of time looking into that sort of thing."
