Introduction

We recently met up with Henri Richard, the Executive Vice President, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of AMD, and spoke with him about several developments taking place in the microprocessor space, particularly the company’s roadmap and views of the competition.

Richard currently oversees AMD’s international sales force, corporate marketing and field marketing initiatives. He joined AMD in 2002 as Group Vice President of Worldwide Sales and prior to that, was Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at WebGain, Inc.


HWZ: AMD is now undeniably leading in performance with their range of dual-core processors. How difficult was it for AMD to design dual-core processors and have them introduced into the market?

Henri Richard: First, designing a new microprocessor is always difficult. We started designing multi-core technology back in 1999 and relative to our competitor, it’s been a lot easier for us to bring to market high-performance dual-core technology because from the ground up, the AMD64 architecture was meant to be multi-core, whereas our competitors are still struggling because their current architecture is not a multi-core architecture but more of a dual-core chip. Of course, that has some consequences both in terms of performance and thermal envelope so clearly today, we have the fastest and coolest microprocessors around.

As for dual-core adoption, I’m pleasantly surprised. We took an approach to price our dual-core products above our single-core products because we believe those are two different markets. Our competition probably wasn’t as comfortable with their technology and decided to have a price overlap so we’re seeing very rapid adoption of our dual-core both in the server and desktop market.

So clearly we’re very high-biased towards the higher end of the performance. There are a lot of people out there that are willing to pay the price that has leading edge technology based on dual-core. We typically have a strategy when we introduce new products of measured marketing campaign—we’re not like our competition rolling hundreds and millions of dollars of marketing. One of the reasons is that marketing is based on end-users and the typical AMD customer wants to buy great technology at the best possible value, not necessarily needing a lot of marketing—money to be put on top of the cost of the product.

By industry standards, we have a very progressive introduction of the Athlon 64 X2 and again the sales are doing very well.

Henri Richard, the Executive Vice President, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of AMD.