AMD Looks To Take Advantage Of Intel Sandy Bridge Recall With New Partner Initiative
David Kenyon, vice president of worldwide channel marketing at AMD, said in an interview with CRN that the theme of AMD's new campaign is "ready, willing, and stable." Kenyon said both AMD's CPU products and GPU products, as well as AMD's new Fusion integrated graphics platform offer a good customer experience, without the setback Intel's Sandy Bridge customers have suffered as a result of the Cougar Point chipset design error.
"I can't speak for our competitors, but I can tell you we at AMD test our products rigorously," Kenyon said. "We’ve launched a number of products over the last few quarters that have been proven reliable and stable."
With the recall of Sandy Bridge chipsets causing uncertainty in the channel and the supply of integrated graphics processors to run low, AMD is looking to take advantage. "There are marketplace shortages due to the Cougar Point issue with the Sandy Bridge release," Kenyon said. "We're not sitting by idly watching it happen. AMD is being very aggressive in reaching out to channel partners, as we have an opportunity to supply the market with our products when there is a shortage."
AMD's initiative consists of a number of co-marketing opportunities aimed at engaging with the partners, and advertising AMD technology that fits the partners' specific markets, Kenyon said. In addition, AMD has planned new sales contests and releases for end users coming up in the next 48 hours, he said.
"We have a number of programmatic things that we're running with our channel partners," Kenyon said. "Some of it is being done with the partners at AMD central, and some things the partners themselves are doing on their sites and with their customer base."
In the past, Kenyon said, AMD was rather passive in reaching out to partners and customers. "What I think you see in the press about AMD these days, aside from some of our executive departures, is we're out there in a much more aggressive way with our APUs," Kenyon said.
Kenyon said AMD is bringing samples to customers and collecting early reviews of the products, including initial impressions from various mobile and desktop partners who've put out some AMD Fusion-based chip designs.
"The best feedback has been when we engage our end customers, show them our products, their graphics performance, battery life, and low heat," Kenyon said. "There's a number of ways to show that. We've used video that shows heat dissipation on our processors compared to Intel's processors, and shows them the way we designed Fusion. For a customer just being able to see it is pretty significant."