Digital Home Thoughts: How Can AMD Beat Intel? Some Ideas

"Think of the Spartans at Thermopylae (the movie 300 was over the top, but makes the point): They were the best trained (highest quality) solders of their time and while they eventually got their butts kicked, they took on a vastly larger force and held them for a prolonged period. They didn't do it by going man to man; they did it by focusing on quality over quantity. You might think of this as another way of saying focus, but it is more than that. It is setting a quality mark higher than your competitor is willing to set - and making the market understand that quality. Think about it: Does Apple compete on price or do they compete on perceived quality? Often, we define products by performance, but there are other measures that are often more important. We don't, for instance, all drive cars with big V8s. Toyota beat GM and Ford not by having more cars, more lines, or more resources. They beat them by having better gas mileage and better quality at similar prices."

Man-who-is-everywhere-online Rob Enderle has a four-step plan for AMD to beat Intel. He has some good concepts, but the hard part is coming up with the product that matches the concept. It's one thing to say "focus on quality, not quantity", but it's quite another to come up with a product that's higher-quality than what Intel has to offer. One of the ways AMD could compete on quality would be to partner with a motherboard manufacturer and optimize the hell out of the board when used in conjunction with an AMD CPU. A few weeks back I swapped motherboards and put a new ASUS motherboard (an M3A78-EMH HDMI) in to partner up with my AMD 6400+ X2 CPU, and it was a complete and utter disaster - I'm still too upset to write about it. Everything worked (mostly) but the performance was atrocious. Actually, no, it was atrocious multiplied by pathetic...squared. If there was a motherboard with properly tuned chipset drivers that would work great with the AMD processor I had, I would have bought it.