As Advanced Micro Devices moves into the lighter notebook market, most of the interest is coming from Asian manufacturers. The California-based chip manufacturer trails larger rival Intel in the notebook market, but has a 30 per cent share of the United States market and 15 per cent in Asia, all of it coming from full-featured systems weighing in at 2.7 kilograms or more. Earlier this year, AMD went to a 0.13 micron manufacturing process that allows it to put more circuits on smaller dies and produce smaller chip packages. In addition, it reduces power consumption by what AMD claims is 30 per cent over their previous chips. The so-called thin and light notebook market makes up only 15 per cent of US and European sales, but up to half in Asian markets like Japan and Hong Kong. AMD had lacked a strong offering in the market. 'We now have that option available and we're starting to see designs, primarily in Asia, starting to use that part and going into the smaller form factor,' said mobile processor group marketing manager Martin Booth. He is in Asia this week briefing customers on plans for AMD's mobile division. Systems using the smaller packaging and possibly shipping at under two kilograms will start arriving late this year or early next, although Mr Booth declined to name the manufacturers. AMD, locked in a price war with Intel, recently dropped mobile chip prices by as much as 26 per cent and has reported losses for the past two quarters. The company's major initiative on the technology front will be the introduction later this year of its Hammer architecture, based on 64-bit instruction sets which will allow faster computing than the 32-bit standard most computers run on today. Intel has moved to 64-bit computing as well, but only on its Itanium server line. AMD plans to introduce Hammer's 64-bit technology in all of its lines, including the mobile processors, by the beginning of the second half next year. Mr Booth said he did not expect many applications would take advantage of the 64-bit hardware in the near term. 'In the notebook space, 64-bit is probably a couple years out.' AMD will be pushing the technology as a way to run 32-bit applications faster and be ready when 64-bit applications are written. In the server space, several Linux developers have announced plans to develop applications for AMD's 64-bit architecture. Mr Booth saw increasing use of multimedia and other power-hungry applications on the desktop as areas for 64-bit development. 'There are a number of areas that are prime candidates for that. Security is maybe one of them,' he said. 'In the area of video entertainment, you can certainly chew up a lot of space doing editing of video and there are more and more home users getting into that technology, with the advent of digital camcorders.' Despite AMD's moves into the thin and light notebook market, and even with the company's acquisition earlier this year of embedded processor firm Alchemy, Mr Booth said AMD was not planning to shift its emphasis away from larger notebook systems. The Alchemy chips would compete with the likes of Transmeta and Intel's XScale line. 'That's a niche market, maybe less than 10 per cent. They really don't sell in huge numbers,' he said. The notebook computer market now gives better profits for chip makers than the slumping desktop sector, but competition should heat up next year as Intel rolls out its Banias line for notebooks. At the same time AMD will likely be talking up its shift to Hammer architecture for all its lines. anhthu.phan@scmp.com
