AMD's "tsunami" of products to change competitive picture

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Ruiz says Intel spends more on media

A RATHER DOWNBEAT AMD shareholder meeting had Hector Ruiz defending his position as two or three shareholders asked him what the heck is going down.


The first shareholder asked why AMD was behind Intel on process technology and Hector Ruiz pointed out that Chipzilla has a lot more marketing and R&D than his firm.

He said: "It's pretty clear to me the two companies have been quite different from the very beginning. Opteron for three or four years was the standard in performance and there was no product that matched it."

AMD's wafer diameter was still 200mm then and it did very well in spite of the process lead Intel had.

Ruiz said that AMD will introduce 45 nanometre chips in the middle of 2008. He said AMD has acknowledged it could have done things in Q4 and Q1 better.

"We have a tsunami of new products coming down the pipeline over the next 12 months," he said.

The next shareholder asked how things were going down with Dell.

Ruiz said AMD is "thrilled" to have Dell as a customer but is in the earliest stages of the relationship. The future promised more.

Another shareholder said that the conference call AMD did in December painted a very rosy picture, but Intel had been executing much better since.

He wanted to know why AMD is being so quiet about new products it might have.

Ruiz said that nothing AMD said in December had changed. He said AMD did have a lull of activity because the next generation begins with Barcelona in the second half of this year.

The next question was from an investor who asked Ruiz whether there was a media bias that didn't improve AMD's position. He asked how long AMD was going to be quiet and let the media have its way. He asked specifically about an article in Hardware Zone.

Ruiz said the reality is that the competitor had become stronger. He said AMD has been a little bit more vocal recently. He said AMD will do a better job in the future being vocal about its capabilities. But he said it costs money to do that. AMD didn't want Intel to have much of a clue about the next generation of products it had, another AMDer said.
The INQuirer