AMD’s results have revealed a weakness in the outfit’s bread and butter lower end chips which is being exploited by Intel.
Intel’s Atom Bay Trail is taking notebook share from AMD and consumer-notebooks do not appear to be making up the missing cash. It seems that Intel has been doing a much better job of convincing OEMs to Atom Bay Trail than AMD. This means that as demand for laptops has stabilised, Chipzilla is in a stronger position.
Barrons said that its recent conversations with notebook ODMs indicate that AMD is ceding material share to Intel’s Atom Bay Trail platform in the sub-$399 computing market.
Intel’s cunning plan, which was to focus on the low-end x86 computing segment after giving up on the netbook in 2012, is paying off. It still has a long way to go before it has the sort of control of that market that it has with overall PC processor sales. It has been estimated that Intel has half of the low end market in comparison to 80 per cent overall in PC processors.
One of Chipzilla’s sales points is that Atom Bay Trail 4-watt processors have outperformed AMD’s 26-watt processors in performance benchmarks.
If that is correct, then the only thing that is holding AMD together is that its APU business division. It has increased 20 percent or more over the past six months thanks to the recently launched Kaveri and Beema APUs. This will make AMD’s desktop APU sales increasingly dependent on expansion from Application Service Providers which some analysts have written off as unlikely.
It might be simply another example where Intel has nobbled a key rival while its back was turned.
