AMD to undercut Intel’s Ultrabooks

AMD is lost market share every quarter so far in 2012 but AMD certainly isn’t going down without a fight. Many of you will have heard of the ‘Ultrabook’ concept, essentially an Intel trademark of a new form factor of notebooks aimed at taking on Apple’s dominance of the ‘MacBook’ market. Now AMD is looking to hit Intel in this market. AMD is not looking to take Intel on performance wise, it cannot match the performance of Intel CPUs in the Ultrabook market. AMD’s game plan is offering similar Ultrabooks with superior graphics performance and a 10-20% cheaper price. It sounds like a great plan because at the end of the day money talks. AMD will give these notebooks the ‘Ultrathin’ naming (how original) and they will run off the next generation of APUs (the successor to then current Llano) known as Trinity.

In 2012, while Intel bagged about 75 design wins for its Ultrabook platform, AMD claims to have already won 20. AMD’s Ultrathin platform will have advantages over Intel’s Ultrathin with regards to platform and component costs. The average AMD Ultrathin with $100~$200 cheaper than the average Intel Ultrabook. Some notebook vendors are concerned that a competitive platform to Intel Ultrabook could result in a price-war between the two platforms, and end up reducing the prices of the now profitable-looking performance ultraportable segment.

Source: DigiTimes