Radeon is a 'crown jewel' of the business
HEXUS: AMD has made significant noise and offered enthusiasts real value with the Gaming Evolved bundles. Are you absolutely committed to providing future bundles that encompass triple-A games?
DMcP: The AMD Never Settle Reloaded bundle is the sequel to last year’s monumental “Never Settle” bundle. It bundles up to four of this year’s most anticipated PC games ─ “BioShock® Infinite”, “Crysis® 3”, “DmC Devil May Cry™” and “Tomb Raider®” ─ with select AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 and HD 7800 Series graphics cards. Our goal is to maintain leadership in gaming, and the bundle highlights just a small part of the continued commitment by AMD to provide an incredible gaming experience on the world’s top PC titles, optimized for AMD Radeon™ graphics cards. Simply put, we want the best games to run best on our hardware.
This is part of our larger gaming-focused strategy, which recognizes that there are three main growth areas for gaming (console, cloud and client) and it is our intention to lead in all three, with the common thread for that leadership success being winning in content, where we are leading with our Gaming Evolved program with partnerships like the ones in the Never Settle: Reloaded promotion.
Added to this, the recent announcement of a semi-custom AMD APU powering the next-generation Sony PlayStation®4 (PS4™) demonstrates AMD’s preeminence in the video game market. In a nutshell, AMD technology is inside all known next-gen consoles: the Nintendo Wii U which leverages semi-custom AMD Radeon™ GPU technology, and the Sony PS4 which is powered by a semi-custom AMD APU, based on the same innovative processor design that powers the best visual experience across millions of PCs and tablets.
Editor's note: Hard to argue with the software bundle on offer. The AMD-laden PS4 bodes well for the Austin outfit.
HEXUS: Following on from this, with AMD effectively providing the bundle, how can add-in-board (AIB) partners continue to differentiate their products? It used to be the case that AIB ‘x’ struck a deal with a software company, providing genuine differentiation from AIB ‘y’.
DMcP: Our primary focus is this: are we enabling our customers with better opportunities and tools to sell our product vs. the competition? That’s what the Never Settle: Reloaded promotion is. A promotion like this benefits all AMD partners, but there is still the capability for AIBs to bundle their own offerings/promotions directly in the box as well. On the hardware side, obviously they also have a level of freedom to design their own board products based on our ASIC’s and you’ll continue to see board variations with different cooling designs, display output option and performance levels.
Editor's note: AMD's software bundle does limit partner differentiation to some degree, but we'd rather see more games for free, just as AMD provides now.
DMcP's counter: The advantage AMD brings that an individual partner could not is the full technical and business relationship that enables these kinds of larger scale partnerships, which in the end every AIB partner benefits from. We encourage partners to add more value through their own bundles as well and help facilitate - and in fact many have done this and continue to do so.
HEXUS: The latest research from John Peddie indicates that NVIDIA holds a 60 per cent share of the discrete video-card market with AMD making up the vast bulk of the remaining 40 per cent. Is it feasible that AMD is at an even 50/50 by year’s end?
DMcP: If you look at the overall market you’ll see that AMD has historically had significantly greater than 50% market share in the notebook discrete GPU space. We fell below that during 2012, hence the focus on prioritizing early 2013 product introductions to notebook first. Based on the strength of our current product offerings and planned offerings that will launch later this year we believe we have strong opportunities to grow share. In the channel space, before the end of 2013 we will launch a new product series and continue to ensure compelling value to potential users through great promotions like Never Settle: Reloaded.
Editor's note: It's interesting to note that AMD clearly focussed on the notebook space in 2012. The firm is also putting great stock in the card-selling potential of the Never Settle Reloaded bundle.
HEXUS: How can enthusiasts feel confident in AMD continuing to provide top-notch engineering and software support in the light of the company making multi-thousand-cuts in the workforce? It surely takes significant expenditure in R+D to produce cutting-edge GPUs?
DMcP: AMD has maintained that Graphics is one of the “crown jewels” of our business and critical to our success today and going forward. Our Graphics IP is one of the core areas where we will continue to invest to drive growth and expand our leadership, as well as CPU and SoC solutions.
Editor's note: We guess that only time will tell if AMD can continue putting out top-class GPUs.
HEXUS: Why should our readers buy an AMD card over one from NVIDIA?
DMcP: Simply put, we have the best products across the range of discrete GPU options. It is our goal to win the hearts and minds of gamers everywhere and make AMD Radeon their brand of choice. It’s for those same reasons that you have seen the top game developers becoming part of the AMD Gaming Evolved program and AMD technology powering both announced next generation consoles from Sony and Nintendo, as well as three out of the four currently shipping game consoles.
Editor's note: Readers, do you agree with Darren? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the HEXUS Community.
