AMD sitting out smartphone market

Advanced Micro Devices is not right away chasing the market for smartphones as it does not align with the company's strength in technologies like graphics, an executive said on Monday.

The booming smartphone or tablet markets

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.

AMD will join Intel in an attempt to unseat ARM, which dominates the tablet market. Intel is as well pushing the x86 architecture to tablets with its Atom chips, and hopes to reduce chip power consumption over the straightway few years to a point where it can match ARM, whose chips are considered more power efficient. Intel is as well entering the smartphone market with Atom, even though there is no "Intel Inside" smartphone but, and the company is considered to be many years away from making any meaningful impact.

The Interlagos chip provides AMD with an possibility to gain back server market share from Intel, Bergman said. Beyond more cores, Opteron chips will provide a power-performance advantage for tasks ranging from cloud to high-performance computing, Bergman said. AMD's Interlagos chips could as well reach market previously than Intel's newer Xeon server chips, which could help gain back some market share.

The last couple of quarters

"We frankly look back over the last couple of quarters, we've been disappointed with the results we've seen from our server businesses as we ceded some market share there," Bergman said.