One vision
Chip maker AMD has announced a new, simplified marketing and branding approach for consumer notebooks, which it hopes will start to earn itself significantly more market share.
AMD, it seems, has finally understood that the 'Average Joe' really doesn't much care, or want to hear about, the nuances of microprocessor architecture but instead primarily just wants to know whether a computing device will actually do for them what they want, at a price that suits them.
This appears to be the pretext for launching the 'Vision' brand, which is designed to help get people thinking about a PC in the same way they do consumer electronics devices and, at the same time, to focus their attention on the visual capabilities of their notebook.
The ‘Vision' brand is a long-overdue move to rationalise AMD's rather disparate and chaotic notebook branding strategy, which must leave many AMD employees baffled, let alone end-users.
AMD's self-interest in this is clear to see. The consumer notebook market is one of the areas in which it competes least well on the CPU side, with Intel and its Centrino brand dominant. So it stands to reason that AMD doesn't want consumers to dwell on the CPU when they're choosing a notebook.
The discrete graphics picture is quite different, however, as AMD has not been shy to point out. It has recently taken the lead in the mobile graphics card market from rival NVIDIA and looks like it might be finally starting to deliver on all the promises made when it acquired ATI three years ago.
But self-interest aside, AMD does seem to be trying to change the way consumers buy notebooks in general, and there's a strong argument that this change is long overdue.