Interviews with AMD's Henri Richard and NVIDIA's Rob Csongor
Tuesday 03rd April 2007, 01:58:00 AM, written by Arun
A fairly extensive interview with AMD's Henri Richard, Executive VP and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, was published at HardwareZone yesterday. It mentions a variety of subjects, and some answers could certainly be deemed quite interesting. At roughly the same time, TG Daily also published another interview with NVIDIA's Rob Csongor, VP of Corporate Marketing.
Of interest in the NVIDIA interview is their emphasis on the mainstream PC market being a large opportunity for them right now, which implies that they are more than willing to compete against AMD and eventually Intel in that segment of the GPU marketplace. Rob also seems very confident of their ability to remain highly competitive against any high-end GPU offering from Intel, such as Larrabee. With regards to Fusion though, he seems skeptical about its impact, but does say they just "don't know" yet.
The interview with Henri Richard also mentions Fusion, and he agrees with the interviewer's notion that this is a "lateral move to create a new market segment", adding that there is "a lot of intrinsic value if you can position yourself as a leader in a category". On the subject of quad-core, he claims to be very enthusiastic about their solutions in the server space, but seems a lot more skeptical about the client market, including both desktops and laptops.
His arguement revolves around the fact that very few consumer applications on the market benefit from quad-core today, and there likely won't that many that will in the future either. Things like HD Video have higher computational requirements, but that can be solved with special-purpose hardware. So he fundamentally claims that quad-core only addresses a very small percentage of the consumer market place. That's his justification behind the Quad FX platform too, apparently.
Amusingly, this position is more similar to the one previously adopted by NVIDIA and ATI, at least internally - it is just incredibly different from Intel and AMD's traditional strategies. It could be argued that the problem with this is that it implies CPUs would eventually become a commodity, such that only prices differentiates products, not performance; AMD's answer to that seems to be to integrate more and more other components, including special-purpose acceleration cores, on the CPU. It remains to be seen what Intel will do in the Gesher/2010 timeframe, though.
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