AMD eyes ARM IP, realignment

LONDON – On a conference call with analysts to discuss AMD's third quarter financial results the company's CEO Rory Read has outlined a change of business model that will see the company "building reusable IP blocks" to reduce development costs and improve speed of execution. Read said that AMD needed to accelerate a move away from reliance on its legacy personal computer market and to get involved in new form factors and applications which would show higher growth.

On the call Read and Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of the global business unit, stopped short of saying AMD would adopt ARM-designed microprocessor cores or use an ARM architecture license but referred to third-party IP as well as AMD's own IP.

However, both executives stressed the importance of third-party IP to help AMD address markets away from the personal computer. Read said AMD was re-aligning to address markets growing faster than the PC market, such as servers and cloud data centers, and embedded applications in communications, industrial and gaming.

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The executives said that to effect a return to profitability it was necessary to take AMD's IP in graphics and other areas and re-apply it to high growth markets including embedded, ow power clients and dense servers.

Read said the company already has a number of design wins in embedded applications for its APUs, which combine its CPUs and graphics processing units. These wins would be revealed over the coming quarters and would help the company to achieve embedded sales at around 20 percent of AMD's total sales in the second half of 2013.

On the call Read asked Lisu Su, to add detail on the IP strategy: Su said: "Let me just add some color to that. I think we said from our strategy all along that we believe we want to build into the larger ecosystems in the industry. So we'll continue to build x86 products. But as we've announced before, we also have a partnership with ARM in the Trustzone and security area and we'll continue to look at how we incorporate more third-party IP over time to address some of these higher-growing markets. Su said product introductions based on such third-party intellectual property would probably come in 2014.



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