AMD to discuss Intel Atom rival in November

Answering a question about AMD’s response to Intel Corp.’s Atom processor, the new chief executive officer of the company, Dirk Meyer, said that AMD was looking forward the market, but would discuss actual products only in November, 2008. The chipmaker cited the fact that it was a much smaller company compared to Intel and could not offer a competing device shortly after the rival’s product launch.

“The first thing to point out is we are a much smaller company, not nearly to scale that our competitor has so clearly we don’t intend to do absolutely everything they do in the marketplace. […] Clearly, when you talk about smaller form factor notebooks and inexpensive notebooks, which is a market segment we are interested in. It is actually a segment that we are starting to offer products to our customers in support of now. We actually haven’t talked in public about that, but I expect we will be talking about it and doing the math when we get together in November at our analyst conference,” said Dirk Meyer, chief exec at AMD.

Late in June ’08 X-bit labs published details about the first K8-class microprocessors and platforms by AMD aimed at ULCPCs and embedded markets. Based on the information, AMD’s platforms for very affordable systems should be competitive against Intel’s Atom based on performance and power consumption.