AMD SVP weighs in on graphics competition

The big graphics picture, according to an AMD senior vice president.

AMD will not engage Nvidia in a price slashing war, AMD's senior vice president of platforms, Rick Bergman, told us in a recent interview.

When asked what AMD was doing to counter Nvidia's strength in the lower end of the channel, Bergman dismissed the issue, saying OEMs preferred AMD's stability and performance per dollar to Nvidia's cut-throat pricing.

"Are we interested in winning share by losing money on every GPU we ship? No," Bergman said. "We're not going to engage in that and we haven't had to."

Bergman maintained that, on a "sustained basis", AMD is actually doing quite well at the lower end of the graphics market, noting, "if you go and look at Dell, HP or Acer's website, you'll actually see a lot of ATI graphics at the entry level."

Bergman added that in the last quarter, AMD had pretty good market share when it came to graphics, smiling acidly as he remarked, "we even made some money. And obviously our competitor [Nvidia] lost a lot of money." Ouch.

When we asked Bergman, who was formerly in charge of interfacing with Intel over graphics, about AMD's other major competitor, the SVP raised an eyebrow and joked, "Who? VIA?" Oh, how we chuckled.

Although Bergman's role with respect to Intel was recently taken over by Matt Skinner, the SVP doesn't think there will be much material difference in the relationship as a result, saying, "we continue to support their [Intel's] platform with our GPUs and vice versa."

As for whether or not AMD is concerned about the advent of Intel's mythical Larrabee, Bergman played it cool, noting, "I don't know what Larrabee is yet, so we're not waiting around." By 'not-waiting-around', Bergman was referring to AMD's new DX11 GPUs, but the firm may have a few more tricks up its sleeve. "A year from now we'll have something new and exciting", he teased, without elaborating further.

That doesn't mean Bergman has entirely dismissed Larrabee as a threat, though. "Intel's a big company and at some juncture they may do graphics right," he told us, quickly adding, "we haven't seen them demonstrate that capability yet."