AMD Takes Aim at India

Electronic News, July 31, 2000 by Uday Lal L. Pai

MPU firm glows under Indian spotlight

Cochin, India - In a bid to capture a slice of the growing microprocessor market in India, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has launched two microprocessors - Duron and Athlon - in the domestic market and has announced a tie up with Skumars.com, a leading Net company here.

"India is a very important market for us and it is our constant endeavor to introduce the latest products to the market,'' said Wee Yep Yin, product marketing manager for AMD's Far East operations.

AMD has a current market share of about 20 percent in India and hopes to increase it to 30 percent by the end of 2001, according to Chong Kum Shiong, area sales manager for AMD.

The company also is expected to make some major India-specific announcements as soon as next week, an AMD distributor said. AMD will count on its traditional mantras of better-than-Intel performance and cheaper-than-Intel pricing to take on its giant rival in the price-sensitive Indian market.

Skumars.com will buy 30,000 PCs based on AMD's Duron processor. The PCs will be used for Skumars.com's nationwide, Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT)-based franchisee network for e-commerce, which is starting operation now. VSAT is a satellite system that can deliver services including packet switching, voice services, data and image transmission, and WAN operations.

"We have agreed to buy 30,000 multimedia PCs based on Duron processors for our franchisee network. We may increase the order to 50,000 depending on demand. We've negotiated a 25 percent discount on the PC prices," said R.N. Bhaskar, managing director of Skumars.com.

AMD has recently announced the end-of-life of its K6-II microprocessor line. The company's Duron microprocessor line now is being positioned as the entry-level family to compete with Celerons from Intel.

At $85 for a Duron 600 and $105 for a Duron 650, these microprocessors are cheaper than Intel's high-end Celerons.

"The Durons are in the higher bracket compared to even the high-end Celerons and the price difference is about $60 to $70," said a spokesman for BBS Electronics, one of AMD's three distributors in India. "We expect the Durons to do well in India as entry-level processors because customers look for value here. Durons will give Celerons a run for their money."

The AMD Duron, a derivative of the AMD Athlon microprocessor, features 192Kbytes of total on-chip cache, a 200MHz front-side bus and a superscalar floating point unit with 3D Now! graphics technology.

On the AMD Athlon processor, he said that it was an x86-compatible, seventh-generation design featuring a super-pipelined, nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture optimized for high clock-frequency operation.

The microprocessor and the chipset are designed to go into value PCs that will sell at less than $1,000. According to AMD, the Duron gives 25 percent faster performance on many benchmarks when compared to Celerons.