AMD Tries to Escape Marketing Vise

(MoneyWatch)  TG Daily has an interesting interview with AMD's VP of product marketing Leslie Sobon on the question of how you market chips these days and the problem of being trapped by the industry's own past marketing tactics.

The problem that the microprocessor market has is analogous to the one you find in digital cameras. Certain metrics have become the consumer touchstone. In the camera market, it's megapixel count on the sensor. That is the one number you can expect any consumer to question when it's time to buy a camera. But if you know anything about digital cameras, you realize that it can answer only a tiny portion of the question of image quality. The software on the camera that interpolates between the pixel points to fill in what the consumer will eventual see is a much bigger deal. Get that wrong and it doesn't matter how many pixels you have, because the results won't be worth viewing. And even with a gazillion megapixels, how much interference between the individual receptors do you get? For microprocessors, the bugaboo has become chip speed:

She said that consumers don't need to know about what the speed of a CPU is, nor do they particularly need to know about the number of cores a processor has. What they do need to know is what a machine does. Intel, she thinks, still concentrates on chip speeds and the technology associated with them overmuch.

I can understand why chip companies are concerned about touting speeds. They're running into walls from quantum physics, the cost of shifting to new geometries in manufacturing processes, the need to dump ever more heat from the devices, and the demand of consumers for portable devices that can last far longer on single battery charges.

There's just one problem with that view: The processor companies and PC vendors have been saying for years how speed was everything. It's fine to say that consumers don't need to know about chip speeds, but they've been trained to focus on that and, now, the number of processing cores. So of course, as Sobon things, Intel keeps promoting on that front. It's what consumers have come to expect ... and, too, Intel has the financial strength to keep pushing those boundaries and forcing AMD to spend money that it would rather not.

If there's any solution, it may be exactly on the mobile front. It's one area where functions as they appear to consumers have been the driving force rather than the technical specifics of the engines that deliver them.

Image via stock.xchng user shuttermon, site standard license.