Feature Articles

AMD - Loaded and Back in Action

By Vijay Anand - 1 Jun 2008

AMD Game! And the AMD Business Class Strategy

New Brand Strategies

Intel has their Centrino-class of marketing and branding to get consumers to adopt their notebooks easily and likewise the same approach is applied with their vPro branding to target OEMs and large business clients. In a similar manner, AMD has just recently launched two new marketing strategies which will hopefully make things easier; AMD Game! is targeted at the casual gaming consumers, while the AMD Business Class goes head-to-head with Intel's vPro for a slice of the OEM/business segment.

AMD Game!

Delving into more details, AMD Game! is the company's bid to classify systems that are capable of smooth HD graphics game play. This would greatly assist casual end-users and the gaming folks to help identify the capabilities of what they seek and in expectations without having to bother with all the specification details. There are two level of AMD Game! platform certifications and they are as follows:-

AMD Game! Platforms
Platforms Minimum Specifications Logo Stack
AMD Game!
  • AMD Athlon X2 5600+ processor
  • ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics
  • AMD 770 chipset
AMD Game! Ultra
  • AMD Phenom X4 9650 processor
  • ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics
  • AMD 770 chipset

This is something that Intel cannot readily replicate on their own since they aren't able to provide an entire systems platform. AMD however does and can easily embark on such marketing. Let's hope they are able to stir things up.

AMD Business Class Strategy

Next, we'll talk about the business segment. With Intel's vPro comes not just the brand and technologies that Intel bundles with, but along comes Intel's proprietary management console and technologies. There are however two concerns of this; one is that organizations don't wish to get locked into something proprietary, while others are looking for a far more comprehensive solution. For this reason, Intel also supports open standards. This is where AMD's Business Class strategy differs, as AMD will be channeling their energy solely into the open standards initiative even though it is generally known that open standards take time to mature. AMD says that testing and evaluations are already underway. They expect by 2009 more organizations and committees will be doing this in earnest and it will be really in 2010 when one will see widespread deployment of these open standards type of manageability.

AMD's Business Class branding is designed with the business in mind to deliver the best value on the market and with these principles, systems with the AMD Business Class branding feature the following:-

  • Better chipsets then the competition for business and multimedia (AMD 780V for now) - open platform to enable a choice of NVIDIA chipsets.
  • Stable top-to-bottom business class CPUs that are great in multi tasking and are energy efficient.
  • Supporting the open industry standard for management and security
  • Windows Vista Business OS

AMD Processors appended with a "B" to the end of their designation denotes the commitment to the OEMs and solution providers to their own customers that if they buy a system with that platform/processor today, they will be able to get the same processor two years from now - most useful for large organizations expanding the user base and adopting more of the same systems/configurations so that they can be easily deployed with the same software image. Thus when an organization buys an AMD Business Class certified system today, he can be guaranteed that the exact same system, configuration, components, drivers and software will be available for up to two years when purchasing the same system again later or for support purposes.

So AMD's proposition to their Business Class systems as opposed to Intel's vPro is primarily on their more capable and balanced platform, plus the full commitment to open industry standard for management and security. Their new Puma notebook platform will also have a business class variant, but more info and design wins will be announced at a more appropriate time.

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