“Our basic strategy is unchanged” – ABT’s exclusive interview with AMD

AMD and Nvidia are locked into what can only be described as a war – a virtual and perpetual battle to one-up each other.  AMD and Nvidia both have amazingly different philosophies and yet they are all gamers at heart and both companies love, innovate and advance PC gaming aggressively.

AMD is right to be particularly proud of their accomplishments in discrete graphics this year as Nvidia has had issues with introducing their Fermi DX11 architecture and AMD beat them to the market by over six months.  Finally, in April of this year, Nvidia launched their GTX 470 and GTX 480 which were criticized for being hot-running, power-hungry and loud although they offered somewhat higher performance than AMD’s HD 5850 and HD 5870. However, a few months later, Nvidia’s newly reworked Fermi, the midrange GTX 460, turned out to be a very successful reworking of GF100 into GF104 that scaled well, ran cool, had good thermal characteristics, and overclocked well, and no doubt ate into AMD’s then DX11 90% marketshare.

To combat the GTX 460, AMD released HD 6870 and HD 6850 which debuted last month.  This is not AMD’s high end which is to come later on this year, but rather their upper-midrange which is renamed from HD 58×0 series and it is designed to take on and surpass Nvidia’s most successful Fermi card, their “sniper”, the GTX 460 in all of its variants.  In AMD’s mind it was “game over” for Nvidia until next year.

Last month at AMD’s Press Event in Los Angeles, they confidently launched their 6800 series as a successor to HD 5000 series, but targeted to specifically bring higher performance to a lower price point.  Considering that the HD 6870 is slightly faster and more efficient than the HD 5850 and it is also cheaper than the HD 5850 at its launch last year, our conclusion is that AMD met their target.

AMD’s Press Event was called “Believe Your Eyes” and they laid out their vision for the world’s press. AMD feels that Fusion is uniquely suited to conquer the world and they stress the “firsts” that they have accomplished, including being first to bring DX11 GPUs to market very quickly and successfully. They are quite proud of their marketshare and do not intend to allow Nvidia to make inroads.  AMD points out the advantages of their Eyefinity which now allows more displays to be driven off of a single card rather than Nvidia’s competing Surround solutions which require two similar video cards running in SLI to power it.

Well, AlienBabelTech heard from AMD and they rightly thought that we’d be interested in the latest Mercury Research “PC Graphics Market Share Update” for Q3 2010 which highlighted the fact that for the second consecutive quarter AMD is the market share leader in discrete graphics.  They pointed out that AMD has made further inroads in the notebook discrete graphics market last quarter, capturing an additional 5.6 share points and surpassing a 60% share in the notebook discrete total market.  AMD feels that this demonstrates the strength of their DirectX11 notebook discrete graphics product selection and also demonstrates AMD’s ongoing focus on graphics. Clearly AMD is aiming for continued success with the newly released AMD Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards.

AMD asked ABT if we would be interested in talking to someone from AMD to get further information on their success to date, and to hear about why they are so excited for continued success with the latest AMD Radeon Series.  Well, we jumped at this chance to interview one of AMD’s executives and as timing would have it, our interview coincided exactly with the release of Nvidia’s new GF110 flagship, the GTX 580 which brought an even higher performing video card to market with none of the thermal and noise issues of the GTX 480 that it replaces.

Nvidia’s response to HD 68×0 – Discounted GTX 460/470s and GF110

We instantly saw Nvidia work to aggressively counter AMD’s new HD 68×0 series by severely cutting their own prices on the GTX 470 and the GTX460.  Nvidia quickly positioned their 768 MB and stock 1GB versions of the GTX 460 against the HD 6850 at $179 to $199, and their highly overclocked GTX 460 versions against HD 6870 at $239.  The result is that it is difficult to find HD 6870s at their suggested pricing.  And proof that Nvidia has fixed their issues with Fermi arrived with the GTX 580 and a likely refresh of the GTX 4xx lineup to combat AMD’s new 6000 series.

In this context, AlienBabelTech was fortunate to interview Stanley Ossias, Director, Mobile Discreet Graphics Product Management at AMD this morning right about the time the GTX 580 NDA ended.  Basically his message was that AMD expected this improved version of Fermi and is well-prepared to counter it now and with their further release of their upcoming HD 6000 series.  They feel that AMD has the right product and the right price point and that competition is good.

This graphics war is getting more and more exciting and ABT is reporting right from the battlefront for you.  We had quite a few prepared questions, but unfortunately the interview was quite short and we focused on AMD’s strategy with this question:

• What is AMD strategy now that they have a very hungry and aggressive competitor after many months of being the only DX11 game in town?  Especially now that Fermi has been re-engineered to fix its flaws.

In addition, we were able to touch on these points before Mr. Ossias’s cell phone battery failed:

• Fusion – how it will enable AMD to be competitive in the netbook market
• Please give us a marketshare breakdown of DX11 parts
• What will happen to AMD’s low-end graphics cards once Fusion comes out, and how it will affect their profits.

So let’s head for the next page and get into the actual interview with Mr Ossias.