December 12th, 2004
Something interesting may be cooking between IBM and AMD. IBM selling off its PC business may open the doors to its aquiring AMD. They certainly complement each other.
IBM has realized that the processors for game consoles are a bigger market than processors for computers. The economies of scale from selling to game consoles can also help pricing for the PC market. After selling PC business to Lenovo - it is not tied to Intel (and its marketing money). It would gain access to more production centres and a real good engineering / R&D team with a bunch of AMD IP (also the x86 cross-licensed IP). IBM would also get the nice low-powered Geode (AMD acquired from National Semicondutor a few years ago).
AMD would get to stand on the shoulders of a giant. Its innovative products are gaining traction in the market but needs more investment and production facilities not to mention the lucrative game console market (It lost out to Intel on the Microsoft Xbox). One of the reasons Dell cites for not selling AMD-based PCs is that AMD can’t produce enough to satisfy Dell’s giant hunger.
Feel free to drop in your comments/thoughts about this at c.sayan at gmail dot com
