By Ramdas S, CRN, November 21, 2011, 1415 hrs
According to reports from IDC India, AMD has doubled its share in the mobile computer market during Q3 2011, compared to its numbers in the second quarter of the year.
While AMD's market share is still less than eight percent at around 90,000 units during the quarter, AMD India management are pleased with the results, and are hoping for a better show during Q4 2011 and Q1 2012.
“We are pleased with the growth, albeit we are actually growing from a smaller base,” said Saivijay Khanagav, Director, OEM Business, AMD India. “Last quarter we had several new vendors such as Sony, Asus and Samsung aligning with us that has done significantly well for us.”
Most of the wins for AMD have been on the new APU platform, where most vendors had introduced SKUs sporting 11.5” or 12.5” screen sizes. Priced about 10 per cent more than netbooks sporting Intel processors, these notebooks have surprisingly done well. AMD officials point that graphics handling capacity of Fusion is comparable to mainstream processors, while it provides similar power savings.
“The campaign by Sony on AMD platform was definitely aggressive, and it seems to have raised demand for the smaller screen sized notebooks,” said Vishal Tripathi, Principal Analyst, Gartner India.
End of September, AMD also managed to get several of the OEM partners launch models with the new A4, A6 and A8 APU platforms, earlier code named Llano. “The response has been very good, and in fact some of the OEMs have run out of stocks. HP recently tested waters bringing in less than 2000 numbers and they disappeared less than a week,” informed Khanagav. “This quarter every OEM except Dell and Lenovo will have a SKU with an A4 or A6 processor. With Dell and Lenovo we have an engagement at global level, which should result in an announcement soon.”
As in the mainstream desktop strategy, adding more cores and focusing on graphics capabilities at the same time providing a better bang for buck seems to be the preferred AMD strategy. For example Asus has a model X53TA-SX096D sporting a quad core AMD A6 Sabine processor that is being retailed at less than Rs 29,000 on the street, and is said to be the only quad core processor based notebook, that is retailing at less than Rs 30,000.
Khanagav expects business to kick-in during December, as general availability of Sabine based notebooks would improve. “We expect almost all OEMs to be shipping a Sabine based notebook next month, so both channels and customers have a choice.”
Another reason for AMD to expect some extra numbers being reported is the Elcot deal, where HCL and Wipro have qualified AMD based SKUs. The general perception is that between these two vendors around 250,000 units would be sold to Elcot. “We are waiting and watching, and cannot comment,” said Khanagav. |