AMD Not Chasing Smartphone Market

Advanced Micro Devices is not immediately pursuing opportunities within the smartphone markets as it does not align with the company’s strength in technologies like graphics, an executive said on Monday.

Smartphones are constrained on battery, pixels and screen space, and AMD has other areas it can focus on in order to grow, said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager for AMD’s product group during the Pacific Crest Securities Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado. The company sees an opportunity to apply its graphics and chip technologies to tablets, where customers are demanding better video and battery life.

“We haven’t announced any plans to go in that handheld space. We’ve got plenty of opportunities… in server, notebook and now tablets, that’s our immediate focus. But if the right circumstances come up and we can see a way to impact the market, we’ll obviously continue to look,” Bergman said.

AMD has faced criticism for not aggressively pursuing the booming smartphone or tablet markets. The company in June rushed to release its first dedicated tablet chip, called the Z-series. The chip is a low-power variant of PC chips based on the Fusion microarchitecture, which includes a graphics processor and CPU on a single chip. Based on the x86 architecture, the chip can help tablets deliver a full PC and graphics experience, the company has said.

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