AMD goes for Intel's Jugular

Things are looking up for the little chipmaker that could.

We've heard whisperings of late to the effect that AMD's sales with the world's largest motherboard maker, Asus, have been skyrocketing, specifically, in the EMEA channel where AMD now accounts for almost 30 per cent of Asus' business.

This is in fairly stark contrast to littler chipper's position 18 months back when AMD was still reeling from the blows dealt by the power of Conroe. Some sources put the change down to John Byrne, who took over as Global Head of Sales for AMD back in December 2008.

Byrne, a competitive Glaswegian, has apparently been pushing his team to turn up the heat ahead of Intel's upcoming Core i5 launch. Unconfirmed reports are that slower parts, like the 7000 series Athlon X2 products will be canned beginning in Q3 (approx 10 days away) in favour of the higher-powered 500 series Athlon X2 parts, built using newer processes, technologies and cache sizes.

For comparison, Athlon 7000-series parts like the 7750 run at 2.7GHz and have a 3MB cache on 95w, whereas the Phenom II X2 545 is clocked at 3GHz with 6MB cache and runs at 80wtdp. So tipping up with a 300MHz speed advantage and double the cache, as well as being built on 45nm SOI, will significantly raise the bar that Intel has to hit with its new line up.

Also, if AMD were to simply stop making the 7000 series overnight, and the market moves to AMD's new higher-powered 5xx series, then Intel PR will certainly have its work cut out for it.

Back in December 2008 when Byrne took control of AMD's leaky ship, the firm had about 30 processors squeezed into the under $US190 space, while Intel managed to span the breadth of the market from $US30 to $US1000 with only about 15 chips.

Byrne appears to have worked tirelessly to reduce AMD's focus on SKUs, instead shifting focus and attempting to create a limited number of 'pressure points' in the chip market competition.

Meanwhile Intel is ramping up the number of SKUs being forced into that space with Core i3 and Core i5 offerings in a twisted role reversal. It would appear that, as AMD makes its roadmap simpler to understand, Intel is doing the exact opposite and sowing confusion, giving its rival significant channel traction.

The worst case scenario for Intel would be that it could end up launching ever more SKUs into the market with ever smaller sales per SKU.

Whether this will be the case or not remains to be seen, but what is already abundantly clear is the about-turn Byrne appears to have pulled out of his magic hat by kicking AMD's sales performance up a notch or two.