Struggling chip Company AMD has moved into the computer design market in an effort to boost sales. The move has been given a boost along by Dell and several other leading PC brands.
The move will initally focus on AMD business desktop computers but will be followed by notebook PCs in the second half of this year. According to Reuters AMD customers who plan to sell the computers include Acer , Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hewlett-Packard , and Lenovo, said Hal Speed, a marketing architect for AMD.
“It’s not like retail,” he said. “People are buying this for work and we really tried to identify the nuggets (of technology for business desktop PCs) that weren’t being looked at.”
The new product line is part of AMD’s efforts to regain its competitive edge against Intel Corpafter a disastrous 2007. AMD has reported six consecutive quarters of net losses as Intel has regained much of the market share that it lost to AMD in 2005 and the first part of 2006.
AMD is also seeking to use the leverage it built with the success of its Opteron microprocessors, which have made inroads into the server market over the last few years against Intel, a larger company.
“AMD has tackled the consumer market, they’ve made significant inroads into the mobile PC market, and they’ve made some inroads into the business market,” said Dean McCarron, an analyst at market research firm In-Stat. “This is an important program for them.”
AMD said Business Class is initially aimed at the small- and medium-size business market, but is also designed to scale up to the biggest corporate clients as well. The desktops include AMD Phenom X3 triple-core and AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processors as well as AMD Athlon X2 dual-core processors.