Q&A with AMD CEO Dirk Meyer

DigiTimes conducted an interview with AMD CEO Dirk Meyer, check it out here.

Q: How did AMD benefit from the spin-off of Globalfoundries?

A: AMD has become a fabless semiconductor company and is no longer required to manage its factories, therefore the company is able to spend more time and energy focusing on R&D and marketing to efficiently boost the investment return of its intellectual property (IP).

In order to speed up the company's response time to market demand, we have integrated the management of CPU and GPU departments and formed a new department, the products group, led by Rick Bergman. As a result, AMD will be able to evaluate all the products with a more comprehensive perspective, helping the company to best use its IP and launching products with an even quicker time-to-market.

Meanwhile, we also have a department, the customer group, that give assistance to our clients. The department is also in charge of marketing as well as pricing of the products to allow the department to quickly respond to client demand.

AMD's CPUs are mostly outsourced to Globalfoundries, while GPU and chipsets are outsourced to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). We plan to outsource APUs to Globalfoundries.

Q: Can you tell us about AMD's APU plans?

A: The Fusion products (APUs) can be adopted into netbooks, notebooks and desktops, and we are already in the process of manufacturing engineering samples with official shipments set for the first half of 2011.

As for the market watchers' concerns about whether APUs will impact the discrete graphics card market, we believe the influence will be very limited since the GPUs in our Fusion products target the mainstream market, and consumers in the enthusiast market will still need a discrete graphics card for their high-performance PCs.

Q: What are AMD's thoughts about Intel and Nvidia entering the tablet PC and smartphone markets?

A: We don't have plans to enter the smartphone market since the industry is already filled with players and we believe that we should focus on the industries where we have advantages, such as notebooks, desktops and servers.

As for tablet PCs, based on our years of observation, I believe tablets have the chance to see obvious growth after average prices drop below US$299. For now, tablet PCs are simply a supplemental product of the traditional PC.

Although AMD is not the first player to enter the industry, if we can find a good business opportunity in the market, I believe we are capable of becoming a quick follower.

Q: Despite the fact that netbook shipment growth is already slowing down, why is AMD still aggressive in the industry.

A: We are still optimistic about the netbook market. According to our internal data, netbook shipments in 2011 will still see an on-year growth of 20%, similar to that of traditional notebooks, meaning netbook shipments will be able to reach 20-30 million units next year.

Due to their cheap price, netbooks are only capable of giving consumers very basic functions such as browsing the Internet and receiving e-mails, but as consumers still demand more from these machines and are asking to be able to run multimedia content as well as playing games, AMD has offered a new ultra-thin series notebook platform, targeting a market segment that we called Super Mobility, which we believe will see quick growth.

The ultra-thin platform allows AMD's partners to develop notebooks with performance surpassing the traditional netbook, but still featuring a similar low price. Lenovo has already released two products that feature the platform, the ThinkPad Edge and ThinkPad X100e.

In 2011, AMD will launch a new processor codenamed Bobcat, targeting mainly the netbook market; however, the processor may also be used for smaller devices such as tablet PCs.

Bobcat, technically, should have no trouble being adopted by tablet PCs, but the choice will still lie in the hands of vendors. Although our CPU's power consumption already meets consumers' needs for tablet PCs, we are still evaluating carefully before deciding how much to invest in the tablet PC market.

Q: What are AMD's plans for cloud computing

A: Facing fierce market competition, our server CPU market share in the past year has maintained level. We believe there are chances us to raise its market share in the future.

We launched our 12-core Magny-Cours processor under the Opteron 6000 series platform in the first half of 2010, and are set to launch the Opteron 4000 series in the future.

Our strategy is to provide our clients with all different levels of products that satisfy their demands with low prices. We believe our strategy can perfectly meet market demand, especially as cloud computing is already becoming a standard application in the IT market.