AMD is pushing into the lucrative commercial PC and notebook market
"Advanced Micro Devices is launching yet another offensive on a market that has been sewn up by Intel for more than a decade.
While the Ryzen processor family that was unveiled in 2017 goes after a premium segment of the PC market with more than $20 billion of TAM (total addressable market), more than half of that is tied to commercial-device sales. Commercial PCs and notebooks are bought by companies for employees or purchased by employees themselves as part of the BYOD (bring your own device) trend. And that’s what AMD has its eyes on.
Commercial customers have more demanding requirements on product portfolio stability and security, and not having a processor designed for laptops was keeping AMD AMD, +1.80% out of race for that $10 billion segment of the market.
PC manufacturers appear to be signing on to work with AMD and its new family of Ryzen PRO processors. This comes at a time when many in the segment want to drive competition with INTC, -0.19% to set performance-improvement demands or to negotiate for lower chip pricing."
First for AMD
For the first time in AMD’s history, the top three OEMs in the world shared a stage in front of media and analysts, launching PCs and notebooks on AMD hardware for the commercial space. AMD claims that this rollout will produce the largest commercial portfolio the company has ever been able to offer, including when it held 20%-plus market share in the early 2000s.
Dell, Lenovo and HP HPQ, -2.35% are all releasing commercial notebooks with Ryzen PRO in them, but there are a couple of stand-out models. The Dell Latitude family will have an option with Ryzen PRO, targeting the largest of Dell’s commercial clients. It’s the first time AMD has been offered. Lenovo built a custom series of notebooks, labeled A-series, that will be exclusive to AMD processors. HP offers the largest collection of Ryzen PRO hardware including tower PCs, small-form-factor desktops and several notebook families.
Ryzen PRO chips integrate the company’s Vega graphics architecture and provide a different kind of performance than Intel’s commercial line. Graphics capability is significantly higher on AMD, and while most think that only benefits gaming, it also means advanced workloads for commercial users like graphics design and CAD run significantly faster.
Changes in the commercial workforce and the kinds of work they are doing is an opportunity for AMD to showcase its design advantages. More consumers are sharing computing devices between work and home life than ever before, and because of that they want more performance in their commercial PCs. Workloads are shifting to more demanding, more graphically intense, applications including graphics design and CAD (computer-aided design). The Ryzen PRO chips exceed what Intel can do in these areas.
But users also want better-looking devices, and before this release, AMD had been relegated to budget notebooks that were cheaply built and generally thicker and heavier. New machines launching from Dell, HP and Lenovo today buck that trend, giving AMD a better chance at taking a significant portion of that $10 billion opportunity from Intel than ever."
New AMD chip goes after $10 billion market that Intel dominates - MarketWatch
