Execution own-goal
In fact, when we spoke to Pomroy to ask him about the Centrino
2 launch, he revealed the reason why Novatech isn’t offering any offering any
equivalent Puma products. “I would like to be selling AMD Puma SKUs but we can’t
get hold of the parts to make one – we can’t find any Turion 64 X2 Ultras,” he said.
The frustrating thing about all this is that the build up to the launch of AMD Puma had been excellently handled (Ed. better than any previous ATI or AMD mobile launch activity I can remember) and AMD’s PR and marketing people created multiple opportunities for HEXUS to get early access to Puma, such as here, here, here, here, here and here. Indeed as far back as last February we saw a great many of its partner's Puma SKUs being debugged and tested at AMD’s Canadian HQ in Markham.
Accordingly AMD generated a decent amount of buzz around the Puma launch and people have been looking forward to seeing it give Intel a run for its money in the mobile space.
But all the buzz in the world isn’t much good if the supply of product lets you down. Our investigations have even revealed that some notebook manufacturers were in a position to launch AMD Puma SKUs very close to the launch date but, in the UK at least, found their efforts to co-operatively market their AMD Puma offerings, frustrated by the complexities of trying to work with AMD sales personnel on such a matter.
Again, this seems to be an execution own-goal by AMD. It knew it had a window of opportunity push Puma into the wild and knew it had to exploit it and yet it hasn’t. Regardless of any technology advantages AMD Puma continues to have over Centrino 2, the genie is out of the bottle now and the predator may well have missed its chance.
