Everything must change
AMD maintained its prominence in the tech news pages at the start of the week withtwo more announcements. First it revealed it had managed to sell off its digital TV business to fabless semiconductor outfit Broadcom, then it revealed a number of major price cuts to its desktop processors.
The latter move appeared to be a clear strategic manoeuvre to take the fight to its larger rival Intel in the market for desktop CPUs that cost less than $200. Intel stands alone in the market for higher priced processors.
At the same time, AMD's competitor in the GPU market - NVIDIA - launched its own show called NVISION. In keeping with its messaging ever since AMD started competing more effectively on GPUs NVIDIA stressed all the extra benefits it thinks you get from buying an NVIDIA graphics card over and above running the graphics in games.
Dell has been going through a protracted realignment of its strategic priorities ever since Michael Dell resumed the day-to-day running of the giant system builder. This week revealed a couple symptoms of that.
First it announced it was getting into the ultra-cheap laptop game, with four models targeted at developing countries. Then it announced a fall in quarterly profits compared to the same period last year. This was put down to a combination of the costs associated with repositioning and the need to drop its pants on prices in EMEA in order to gain market share.
Dell would have to go some to match the price of the new sub-notebook being distributed by Yorkshire distie Target Components, however. The Windows CE based 3K RazorBook 400 is expected to be offered to the channel for a paltry £120.
There was sad news this week as we learnt that a favourite of the PC enthusiast community - abit - was going to exit the mainboard market at the end of this year. Universal abit, as it's now known, intends to reinvent itself as a consumer electronics brand, but many members of the HEXUS.community were quick to express their sadness at the news.
