AMD’s CEO Talks Atom Rival, Global Foundries

In a short interview to Digitimes, AMD CEO spoke a little about the company’s plan to counteract rival Intel’s Atom chip.

Revealing nothing but a vague date, Meyer said that the company will begin sampling to partners in the beginning of 2010, while not attempting to break into the Netbook form-factor.

Let’s read a little into this. In the ultraportable notebook segment, AMD already has the AMD Neo (single- and dual-core), which will do nicely when it comes to powering tiny notebooks, so where exactly does this Atom rival fit in?

Considering the ARM-based netbooks that were on display at Computex 2009, Meyer also mentioned that ARM architecture wouldn’t make it big in the netbook market due to lack of software support. Of course he probably hasn’t heard of Nokia’s Ubuntu-on-ARM project, Android, which should get there with a little optimisation and even Moblin for ARM.

Well, “Atom” of course covers not only netbooks – which AMD disregards as a dead-end segment – but also MIDs. Now, AMD eyeing the MID business would prove very interesting indeed. Are we in for an AMD MID-class device in 2010?

Possibly of equal interest, Meyer pointed out that, while Global Foundries is the company’s CPU manufacturing partner and they have a great relationship with TSMC, there are additional partnerships with Chartered Semi and UMC which the company will not overlook in the future.