Cooler rivalry
In a recent exclusive interview with HEXUS.channel, AMD's VP of worldwide channel marketing conceded that AMD could have done a much better job of marketing its ultra-thin notebook platform - Yukon.
We also feel that it could have done more with its notebook platform Puma, which, thanks to AMD's M780G chipset, offered far superior integrated graphics to anything Intel had to offer at the time of its launch, a year ago.
The only real growth in the PC market these days is in the consumer notebook sector, so it wouldn't be surprising to see AMD focus a lot of its CPU, GPU and chipset resources on the notebook market in the next 12 months, possibly starting with Yukon's successor - the dual core Congo.
Meanwhile NVIDIA (and to some extent Intel), have decided the future is in very low power processors. Given that both companies are coming at the hand-held market from more or less a standing start, they're understandably focusing a lot of their attention on it.
HEXUS.channel will shortly be speaking exclusively to Mike Rayfield, GM of NVIDIA's mobile business unit. Watch this space for that interview because, among other things, we're hoping he'll have a Zune HD and a Samsung M1 (which NVIDIA has confirmed contains a Tegra chip) and will shed further light on NVIDIA's broader strategy.
This is an interesting juncture in the often bitter rivalry between NVIDIA and AMD as each one focuses more on generating its own unique proposition and spends less time thinking about the other one. Probably a wise move when Intel remains the big kid on the semiconductor block.
