Author Archive
A New World Order
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 12:16 PM
(6 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
Loading ...There is a “waterfall” theory that has a well known application to car design but that is also misapplied to the PC industry. In the car world, features that first appear in high-end cars eventually become standard. You used to pay a significant amount for a CD player while now they are standard for most models; the high end cars have moved onto MP3 or satellite players.
Unfortunately, the same basic assumption about the “waterfall” effect has plagued the PC world.
For years, the conventional wisdom has been to load high-end features in the business PC, with everyday consumers eventually benefitting from those features when they became “commoditized”. You’ll recall the conversations along the lines of, “No one buys an Apple computer because you can’t run the same software on them that you run at work.” Other than for high-end gamers, the convention wisdom has been that consumers need only low- powered, low-end machines.
Clearly, the world has changed.
Video, music, pictures and other “blobs” (binary large objects) have changed the requirements for consumer PCs. Today everyday users expect superior graphics, powerful hard-drives, more memory and sometimes even faster processors than many business users. Running primarily Microsoft Office, Excel and Internet Explorer, on the other hand, has rendered business users the ones needing only lower-capability machines.
Yet, the typical business user’s workload requirement is in stark contrast to the amount that businesses generally pay for the machines their employees use. I am willing to bet that if you are reading this at work, the PC you are using costs as much as double the average PC in your local retailer ― and is likely significantly less powerful. IT departments tell you that they pay for other things like maintenance and warranties, software and support, all things you might not get on your store bought PC. And business PCs can sometimes be loaded with features that IT buys for insurance but are never used.
Many business users don’t like their work PCs because they are heavy and don’t compete with more compelling looking consumer PCs. You have to give Apple credit for a massive rethinking of PC industrial design. The PC is now a mainstream fashion and status statement (with some exceptions of course). Dell has colorful tops; HP offers sharp design.
But this is an evolving landscape. The expectations for and cost of retail PCs is going to change the way businesses think. At a Gartner conference last month I learned the name for this phenomenon: “consumerization”.
To quote a recent report from Gartner*: “The consumerization of IT focuses on how enterprises will be affected by and can take advantage of new technologies and models that originate and develop in the consumer space, rather than in the enterprise IT sector.”
Over the next few years we will likely see more and more effects from consumerization that will go beyond design to the software, networking and all other elements of our experience. Personally, I travel with an HP DV2 and would like to move to the new HP DM3. It’s great for work, and it plays music, video and other blobs.
I think I may have already been consumerized.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
*source: Gartner, Inc. “Key Issues for the Consumerization of IT, 2009″, February 3, 2009
Celebrating Windows 7
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 11:09 AM
Today you can find me as a guest on Microsoft’s Windows blog. We are excited to join Microsoft in celebrating the release of Windows 7 operating system! As always, your comments are vital to the discussion so please let me know what you think about today’s blog. Enjoy.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
Stream On
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 1:22 PM
I need your help to save the world from boredom and proprietary standards. Together we can prevent a future where we have to wait for media-intensive applications to finish processing. Don’t make me wait endlessly for a video to transcode from one format to another, or twiddle my thumbs waiting for the search function to find that picture of my favorite niece. OK, enough marketing ….
The AMD engineering team has posted our ATI Stream SDK v2.0 for OpenCL 1.0. Now you can have the ability to tap into the full processing performance available from multi-core CPUs and GPUs at the same time, using an industry standard language. Write it once, use the OpenCL compiler of choice from the different hardware vendors, and you are now running your app across different platforms. (Notice we’re not stuck on the single vendor, GPU or CPU-only path favored by others in our industry.)
I’m not the only one who sees the potential of open standards in this arena. Many of our technology partners do as well. Listen to David McAllister, director of open source and standards at Adobe:
“Adobe is a strong believer in industry standards; they allow developers to focus on innovation instead of platform support,” said David McAllister, director Open Source and Standards, Adobe. “The ATI Stream SDK with OpenCL is a solid implementation of a strong standard.”
And Corel:
“Corel plans to integrate OpenCL into our digital media products and we believe it will offer significant benefits to Corel, our customers and partners,” said Jeremy Liang, senior vice president of Digital Media Development, Corel. “With this new open standard, AMD will be providing drivers to take advantage of the latest CPU and GPU features which we anticipate will improve the overall performance of our digital media applications running on AMD platforms, while simultaneously reducing our development efforts in this area.”
As an industry insider, it’s obvious that the GPU (working together with the CPU) is the next frontier to help dramatically increase the performance of PC and server platforms, especially for some of the most popular applications. The YouTube and iPhone generation have made distribution and consumption of high definition media pervasive. Everyone’s a producer and consumer of moving and still images, distributing their content to their spheres of influence worldwide over the Internet, and over the home network. With OpenCL, now we have an industry standard to accelerate those applications and make them easier and faster to use.
Don’t take my word for it; you can see HP and AMD’s director of ATI Stream technology, Patti Harrell, talk more about how OpenCL influences this trend here.
My colleague, Simon Solotko, has an excellent companion blog that gives another perspective on the relationship between, OpenCL, AMD’s traditional support for industry standards, and the new ATI Stream SDK v 2.0.
So, please help us all. Take up the challenge and do something great with OpenCL. Grab the ATI Stream SDK v2.0 and leverage the power of AMD CPUs and GPUs working together to accelerate your vision.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
All the Great Things are Simple
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 11:31 AM
If you’ve read my blog even a half dozen times, then no doubt you’ve heard me espouse on the three tenets of AMD’s corporate Fusion message. (I am the branding guy at AMD after all.) Fusion is about what differentiates AMD. It’s about how we:
· Integrate technology to do new things
· Collaborate intimately with our customers and business partners to help solve their problems
· Impact the market
I want to dissect that second bullet about customer and business partner intimacy. A lot of companies say they embrace it, but what does it really mean? I actually like the Wikipedia definition of customer intimacy and about how it creates a virtuous circle: the better the supplier knows the customer’s objectives and difficulties, the better able the supplier is to provide a customized solution. The more adapted the supplier’s product or service is, the happier the customer will be, and the stronger the bond is between the two parties.
AMD’s latest bonding effort comes in the form of the AMD Fusion Partner Program, launched today. At its core, the new program is about simplification. We are making it simpler to be one of AMD’s channel partners. We are simplifying channel partners groups and benefits. We are making it easier for our partners to offer AMD-on-AMD-on-AMD systems. The specifics of the new program are outlined by David Kenyon here in AMD’s worldwide channel blog.
By making it simpler for our channel partners to do business with us, we’re hoping to create closer, more effective business relationships with them. We want to work with our channel partners to better understand their customers’ needs. And by creating this level of closeness and simplifying the way we do business, we’re enabling our channel partners to form closer bonds with their customers.
Because around AMD, you won’t ever hear the phrase “Don’t take it personally – It’s just business.” For us, when it comes to our customers and our channel partners, business is personal.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
Talking ‘bout Twitter (in >140 characters)
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 11:32 AM
I have been asked to talk at TWTRCON in DC in a few weeks and I have been thinking about what to talk about. Your ideas and thoughts would be appreciated.
As I mused on the subject of Twitter, two thoughts crossed my mind (not a long journey). This collision of particles in a near perfect vacuum was created by something I saw on CNBC and something I read online.
Thought 1: Twitter is the Krispy Kreme of new media
I used to joke that when it came to Krispy Kreme donuts, there were only two types of people in the world: those who loved them and those who had yet to try one. The same can be said about Twitter.
Last Friday on CNBC the hosts of the morning show were making fun of one of their own team for using Twitter. It was the standard rubbish about “Don’t you just tell everyone you just ate a hamburger?”
It’s always ironic to me when a media outlet misses the point about a tool like Twitter. I suspect that the Executive Producers at CNBC could talk for a long time about who their audience consists of and what that audience is interested in seeing and hearing on TV. I would argue the same is true about most Twitter users.
Most of us are really clear about who we are talking to, and if those people were not on Twitter we wouldn’t use the tool. For me, Twitter gives me the ability to talk to AMD’s main target market, those people who we call our “processor-aware” audience. This audience includes analysts, investors, journalists, customers and enthusiasts, and a majority of these key people are on Twitter. If you want to know if the same if true for you, go to www.twellow.com and put in the name of your biggest customer – you may be surprised by what you see.
Of course there are people on Twitter who just talk about what they had for dinner and what the weather is like – and they enjoy it. Good luck to them. Who are we to say that’s a wrong use of the tool?
Thought 2: You should panic when bureaucrats and politicians get it before you do.
Federal Computer Week recently reported that The White House is ranked the #1 government agency on Twitter with more than a million followers, followed by CDC Emergency with more than 800,000.* There are 168 registered accounts tweeting from the Executive Branch and 33 accounts tweeting from the US Senate (that’s a third of them). The Senate seems to win over the other lot with only 118 accounts tweeting from the US House of Representatives (that’s 27%). I also found this stat particularly interesting: 66% of the 2.74 million members of the military use social media.
All those numbers underscore my point: If you want to communicate your point of view then Twitter is a great way to talk to people who are interested in what you have to say. People who don’t care will continue not to.
For those risk-averse businesses out there that have shied away from adopting social media, let me I point you back to the military social media adoption stat. I’ve never heard of losing a war because of a Facebook entry. So if your company is sitting on the social media sidelines, my suggestion is to stop panicking, trust your teams and empower them to use these new tools to reach your key audiences and advance your goals.
For the record, I love Dunkin’ Donuts too…
*Top 10 agencies on Twitter, FCW lists the top 10 most popular tweeters
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
Speaking Directly
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 11:01 PM
So the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series is the first and only fully-compliant DirectX 11 graphics processor in the market. I get that. It is going to be ‘the thing’ that every game player worth their fragging-rights needs this holiday, if not before. I get that too. It is going to run the best and most exciting games ever with sexy stuff like tesselation. I even get that.
What I also get is – it’s about so much more than playing games.
The “more” is around something called DirectCompute. In many ways it’s the feature that my favorite applications are going to benefit from more than any other so I thought it would be worth spending a blog on.
DirectCompute is a component of the DirectX11 API to be released with Windows 7. It is fundamentally designed to enable GPU compute and enables applications to take advantage of the massively parallel computing power of the GPU.
What does DirectCompute mean for users? Simple: you have two great processors in your PC – one CPU and one GPU. And your system can use both to solve problems. For some workloads, like GPU-accelerated video transcoding and rendering, this combination can really speed up your throughput.
So as you begin compiling your holiday wish list, keep your eye out for systems with this astounding GPU compute capability. But here’s my caveat emptor. When you look at specifications of GPUs, it is important to note there are different levels of support provided for DirectCompute.
One level, which AMD terms DirectCompute 10, runs on the legacy path of the DirectX 11 API to support previous generation of DirectX 10/10.1 GPUs. If offered a system with this feature, just say no. You should demand what we at AMD call Direct Compute 11. This is the only version designed to unlock the full feature set of DirectX 11 and, as I mentioned previously, the only architecture that is fundamentally designed to enable GPU compute.
For developers, DirectCompute 11 represents a paradigm shift for GPU compute development. It will now be much more straightforward for developers to code using this architecture. No longer will they have to do contortions and jump through hoops to code what they want to. DirectCompute enables new algorithms that were not possible previously. Some examples of these advanced techniques are order independent transparency, ray tracing, better shadows, and depths of field. If you are interested in more details, you can read this white paper. DirectCompute is a de-facto industry standard for developers of GPU-compute applications and as such, it should not be confused with proprietary APIs (and by “proprietary” I mean supported by only one supplier’s hardware).
These are some of the reasons why at AMD, we are excited about the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series graphics products. It’s not only the first and only GPUs in the market with full DirectX 11 support it is the only one to unlock the full feature set of Windows 7 and DirectCompute 11.We are proud of this technology leadership. We believe this industry standard will accelerate industry adoption of GPU compute applications running on Windows7 and add a new dimension to the end user’s computing experience.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
Monty Python’s Intel
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 5:29 PM
PR people sometime have a hard job. I know it sounds easy but it really is not.
Let’s take today’s news from EU about the Intel ruling. Watching Intel’s PR people respond is like a scene from Life of Brian. With all due respect to the movie, I offer you my hypothetical version as it played out in the press today.
Intel: The Commission consistently construed ambiguous documents in a manner adverse to Intel.
Interviewer: What about the emails from Intel employees?
Intel: Yes but ignoring those, they have no clear evidence.
Interviewer: What about the email from PC manufacturers’ employees?
Intel: Well, we’re ignoring those too.
Interviewer: And the retailers?
Intel: We don’t listen to retailers.
Interviewer: And all the memos?
Intel: Yes but besides the emails from us and the PC manufacturers, evidence from retailers and the memos they have, there’s really no support whatsoever for their side of this case.
Interviewer: What about the secret conversations?
Intel: Secret conversations! What else you got?
Interviewer: And what about the two previous findings against Intel in Japan and Korea?
Intel: Now listen clearly. If you ignore the emails, evidence from retailers, memos, secret conversations and the findings from a majority of the civilized world, I think we can all agree their evidence is “insufficiently clear”.
Can I play the John Cleese part?
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
A New Way to Buy PCs
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 11:05 PM
Someone on this blog once commented that AMD is “out-marketed” by our competitor. I believe they meant to write that we are “out-spent”. Regardless, it is a challenge to be a CMO competing against a monopolist. The right thing to do is not out-spend them, but instead to be smart about getting close to the customer and their needs.
Sometimes, that means doing the complete opposite of the conventional approach. And today, we believe it’s time for some unconventional thinking.
The truth is that little has changed in the way x86 processors are marketed since AMD introduced 64 bits and multi-core processors. Even then the marketing, while it was new and creative, was another way of saying, “faster, better and more.” It didn’t fundamentally change the way the industry talked about its products.
And today, in the mobile or notebook world the key issue for consumer is not the processor (or even the speed of the processor), but rather the combination of parts – or the “platform” as we call it – that make up the machine. There are of course customers who still want the processor which has the fastest “0-60 mph” speed, but we believe most mainstream consumers are more interested in how they are going to use the system, not necessarily how fast it is.
One of the reasons for this disconnect is that the “0-60 mph” speed metrics are derived through benchmarks like SysMark07. I have used this blog to talk about how a benchmark like MM07 on its own does not reflect typical battery usage (i.e. they don’t tell the “whole story”), and SysMark07 has the same limitation with workloads. I will leave it to other people to detail why this benchmark is inadequate for most users, but I will point out that the software the benchmark uses has virtually nothing to do with videos, music or helping your manage your photos. Also, it doesn’t run Windows 7.
The Consumer PC Buying Experience Today
For the typical consumer considering a notebook purchase, the first question is typically a usage question, maybe followed by a size and weight consideration. In testing we did, not once did the shopper ask for a processor brand as primary consideration. What mainstream consumers want is machines on which to do office work, to watch movies, to listen to music, to edit their photos and even edit their videos.
While processor speed has an effect on how quickly some of these types of workloads can be done, other parts of the platform – elements like the graphics cards, the size of the screen and the reality of how long the battery will really last – can be just as important.
If we are going to help the consumer get the right machine for them, we really need to market to them in a way that makes sense. We started that a few months ago by beginning an industry conversation around battery life. Today we want to take that to the next level.
A New VISION
Today we introduce a whole new way to help consumers buy the right machine for their needs. Today AMD is introducing a new approach in retail we call VISION Technology from AMD.
Other blogs will give you all the details about what this represents in terms of the brand and the technology – the platform. In particular, check out Pat Moorhead’s blog on our new ultrathin mainstream notebook platform or Ian McNaughton’s blog on how Microsoft Windows 7 and DirectX 11 are also going to enhance users’ computing experiences. And for a simple guide you can check this website www.amd.com/whichvision.
In its simplest form we are connecting the needs of the consumer to the PC – not the processor. When you go into a retail store this holiday you will see VISION Basic, VISION Premium and VISION Ultimate on many PCs powered by AMD technology – not the name of our processor. Straightforward guides for retailers and consumers will help them know which VISION is right for them.
- VISION – Basic is for people who use productivity tools like Microsoft® Office and who surf the web, maybe listen to music and look at their photos
- VISION – Premium is for those who also want to watch High-definition and Blu-rays, edit photos and play some games
- VISION – Ultimate is for the video editor and 3D game player
We are also going to enable a VISION – Black edition for our technology partners who build the high-end, top of the line systems.
There is a lot more to VISION than I can capture in one blog – I am sure I will be doing others.
Just in case you were worrying, VISION Technology from AMD will extend to desktops early next year and your retailers will be able to tell you what parts went into your VISION system (it will be on the fact tags).
In the end it is about getting you the right machine for your needs because it’s about making your vision a reality.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
Walking the “Green” Walk
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 10:05 AM
There is a big difference between saying and doing. All too often in business (or marketing) you’ll hear promises and claims that will unfortunately never be realized. And this trend is not restricted to outrageous product claims; it can extend to how a corporation acts.
At AMD we take our pledges to our stakeholders seriously, and this includes our constant focus on being a good corporate citizen.
Earlier this year I blogged about some of the ways AMDers all over the globe are helping make good on that pledge. Today, AMD released two reports that provide additional detail about our ongoing efforts to minimize our corporate footprint. Better yet, they show concrete movement against our benchmarks.
The 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report provides detail on our efforts in support of environmental protection, corporate governance and social responsibility. The Global Climate Protection Plan, meanwhile, outlines AMD’s strategy and goals for global climate protection and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition to receiving a Climate Protection Award from the EPA and achieving LEED Gold certification for our Austin, Texas “Lone Star” campus, AMD is also on track to achieve our EPA Climate Leaders goal of reducing normalized emissions by 33 percent by the end of 2010.
We’ve also made great progress in enhancing the communities where AMD does business with efforts like the Green Power Group California Affiliates or the AMD North American Go Green commuter program that eliminated an estimated 1,027,000 miles of driving, conserved approximately 50,000 gallons of gasoline and avoided approximately 430,000 kg of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2008.
And as a global company, our efforts are worldwide.
Programs implemented at AMD’s Suzhou facilities, for example, have reduced power consumption by approximately 4,655 Megawatt-hours (MWH), enough energy to power more than 2,000 Chinese households for a year based on a projected average annual energy consumption of approximately 1,800 kWh per household. Similar efforts at AMD’s Markham, Ontario data center replaced 1,152 servers with 312 servers using new energy efficient Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, resulting in calculated annual energy savings of more than 1,750 MWH.
I encourage you to bookmark AMD’s corporate responsibility page for updates or stop by our page on social responsibility networking site JustMeans.com to share your opinion or engage in conversations in a place where business and social responsibility meet.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
Evaluate and Innovate?
Posted by Nigel Dessau in 10:36 AM
For some broad thoughts on AMD’s approach to marketing, particularly social media and other cost-effective ways (say, a blog!) to reach our audiences, please take a moment and read this Q&A that B2B Magazine was kind enough to publish online as their “CMO Close Up.” While their audience tends to be marketing types like me, your response to the Q&A would be a great check for me on whether you agree we’re being smart about reaching, well, you.
I look forward to reading your comments.
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.