AMD and PDAs

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Aggressor Prime
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AMD and PDAs

Post by Aggressor Prime »

Why haven't I seen any AMD-based PDAs if AMD makes CPUs for them?
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CDN_Merlin
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Post by CDN_Merlin »

Heat issues?
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Aggressor Prime
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Post by Aggressor Prime »

Well, with nForce 3 120, you can put an Athlon 64 3400 in a Pocket PC.
Au1100s (up to 500MHz)are designed for PDAs.
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Post by MD-2389 »

Probably because they haven't put anything into that area yet.
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Post by Mobius »

Yep. AMD concentrate on desktop and laptop CPUs only. Don't forget, they have made losses for most of their 30 year existence! How they manage to continue is a testament to the staunch nature of the Director's (A lot of them have lost fortunes due to being diluted).

Given this, they desperately need to make money! Right now, (last quarter) they were actually profitable - and it looks good for the future too. I suspect Intel is going to licence X86-64 from AMD - and won't that just burn Intel, paying royalties to AMD for every 64-bit desktop CPU they make? Hehe.

Anyway, up until now, the only real money-making venture AMD owned was their flash-memory business - which is very profitable. The profits have been used to prop up the CPU division where they (rightly, as it is turning out!) see the real money.

Thank Goodness they've persevered too - because otherwise the fastest cores now would be 1.8GHz and we'd be paying Intel about $500 each for them!

The PDA CPU market is currently very well catered for: Intel has the Strong-ARM processor, and numerous other manufacturers make 'em too. This being the case - any marketing major will tell you that going into a market against established market leaders is a very tricky and expensive headache. Mostly the words "doomed to failure" spring to mind. (Try setting up against Coke - and see how you go!)

I can't see AMD entering the mobile device market for quite some time - as they now have to concentrate (and invest!) hard to bring the AMD64 to a 90nm process and defeat (or at least get more market share from) Intel in the desktop market. This market is Multi-Billion dollars a year - and AMD has a decent chance to snag some more money from Intel's coffers.

Rest assured though, Intel is gonna fight back hard, ramping Prescott and Tejas to 4+GHz by year end, and by that time, they'll be running Windows XP64 too - so Intel will get a big performance spike when that happens.

If AMD can successfully prosecute their plans against Intel (And who knows what a desperate company with 30 Billion in the bank might be prepared to do?) then you might reasonably expect AMD to begin looking into the mobilemarket - either as designers, or fabbers, some time in 2006. Maybe. Image
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