AMD: Time to Play Down Chip Speed in Marketing PCs

September 10, 2009 at 5:00 am PT

There was a time when people cared a lot about the microprocessors in their PCs–a bit like teenagers once bragged that their Impala had a 450-horsepower V8 engine under the hood. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) seems to be betting those days are over.

The Silicon Valley company–perennial underdog to Intel (INTC) in the microprocessor wars–has been sending out signals that it wants to move away from marketing such chips based on how fast they are. Leslie Sobon, vice president of worldwide marketing, argues in an interview this week in TG Daily that customers don’t need to know that kind of techie stuff–what’s more important is what a PC with one of its chips does, what chores it’s best suited for. A new marketing campaign based on that concept, dubbed Vision, is expected to be announced Thursday.

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Tagged with: Advanced Micro Devices, advertising, AMD, digital, Digits, Don Clark, frontpage, hardware, horsepower, innovation, Leslie Sobon, marketing campaigns, microprocessors, PCs, Silicon Valley, teenagers, TG Daily, The Wall Street Journal, vision

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