AMD Rebrands Chips: Does Anyone Really Care What's 'Inside' Their PC?

downplays

AMD launched its Vision chip brand, which breaks out its 22 processors into three product lines: Vision Basic, Vision Premium and Vision Ultimate. AMD's thinking is that a traditional marketing campaign that provides individual hardware specs is pretty much irrelevant to the average customer.

"Today's consumer cares about what they can do with their PC, not what's inside," said Nigel Dessau, CMO of AMD, in a statement. "They want a rich HD and entertainment experience on their PC, delivered by the combined technology of AMD CPUs and GPUs, without having to understand what Gigahertz and Gigabytes mean."

Instead, Vision will focus on what kind of computing features the chips provide to help customers pick the right kind of processor for their needs such as video, digital media and content creation.

On Thursday, AMD also said that its new notebook platforms will contain Vision technology. The mainstream OEM notebooks will have next-generation HD graphics technology for HD and Blu-ray video playback, lifelike 3-D games, sharper photo capability, and better multi-tasking power for editing photos, music and videos.

AMD will roll out the new notebooks to coincide with Microsoft's Windows 7 release in October. Windows 7 supports DirectX 10, Direct X10.1, and Direct X11 for better 3-D detail on games and other media apps, and a Unified Video Decoder. This frees up the CPU so that users can get faster response times when converting video for handheld devices, and is easier to do with the new drag-and-drop feature of Windows 7, according to AMD.

"We are excited for the upcoming launch of Windows 7, when our OEM partners will introduce some exciting new PCs that match our mutual customers' needs and feedback," said Mike Ybarra, general manager of Windows Product Management at Microsoft.