Posted by Sam Reynolds — May 24th, 2012

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Rory Read, CEO of AMD, said that his company would withdraw from the processor speed war with Intel claiming, “the era is done”.

“That era is done,” said CEO Read in an interview with Bloomberg. “There’s enough processing power on every laptop on the planet today.”

“I think we come in and steal the bacon around the whole thin-and-light movement and capture a significant portion of the opportunity there,” he added.

Mr. Read said that AMD’s processor strategy would focus on producing chips that are optimized towards working with the cloud; the chips of the future for the consumer will need to be designed to efficiently play video as opposed to crunching through shear volumes of data.

In many ways Mr. Read’s comments are a follow up to the comments an AMD spokesperson made to The San Jose Mercury News in November, stating that the company will focus on more than just the “AMD versus Intel mindset” while remaining committed to x86.

Mr. Read said to Bloomberg that this transformation would be done by 2015.

“It can be a very different AMD going forward, but we have a long way to go,” he said. “There’s been a passion for innovation but there needs to be a passion for delivery and a passion for the customers.”

Given NVIDIA’s focus last week at the Graphics Technology Conference that the GPU would play a much larger role in the future of computing, it is possible to speculate that AMD sees its future rival as just NVIDIA – and perhaps other ARM manufacturers –, not NVIDIA and Intel.

AMD should announce more details, or provide some clarity, at their Fusion Developer Summit in June.


So is this an admission of defeat?