In a recent interview with Mercury News, AMD spokesman, Mike Silverman, revealed the company's intentions to focus away from its battle with Intel in order to pursue new markets such as mobile computing, "We're at an inflection point ... We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore."
It appears as though AMD finally has a plan in place to tackle its recent string of bad luck. Despite maintaining fairly consistent sales of $5 to $6.5 billion over the past seven years, profits have have been but a few hundred million dollars, with the company earnings massively offset by costly ventures such as its investment into GlobalFoundries and the purchase of graphics firm, ATI. Whilst the purchase of ATI still feels very much a positive asset for the company, the same can not be said of GlobalFoundries, as AMD is slowly but surely moving away from the firm after poor performance and low-yields of silicon.
It makes sense to enter emerging markets where the firm will either not have to compete with Intel or will at the very least be starting on a more equal footing. AMD will not confirm full details of its new strategy until February and so until then, it's anyone's guess how it may go about its new entry into the mobile market. Suggestions have been flying around that the firm may even look to licence and work with ARM designs; certainly ARM is well established as the mobile leader and working with, rather than against ARM and risking the full wrath of the firm's many partners would seem like a sound move, though, either way AMD will of course have to compete with the likes of NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Samsung on some level and, with the same ARM designs, would it be able to differentiate itself successfully from the competition? Supporting ARM and taking focus away from the x86 architecture could prove to be an ingenious move to lock Intel out of the mobile market by stifling mobile software development for x86. It is still quite possible, however, that AMD will continue as it has and place effort into the development of its own designs with a new focus on the requirements of the mobile market.
There are some trailing concerns that as AMD takes its focus away from competition with Intel, the big blue giant could slip into complacency with no real competitor and that progress in the x86 market could slow. It looks as if we'll have to wait until February next year to know for sure what the score will be.
