I got to spend a little time with Dr. Gaith Kadir, the General Manager for AMD in the Middle East & Africa and Pakistan. The following is a summary of some of the key ideas we discussed at the AMD office.

We started off with complaining on the lack of sample availability for higher-end CPUs in the region. T-break had only received the X2-5000+ a few hours before the NDA while the FX-62 wasn’t in our hands until about a month after the launch. Dr. Kadir acknowledged this and said that AMD is working hard to allocate enough samples in the future to allow widespread coverage for their future launches.

Next, we spoke about upcoming AMD products and were informed that the K8L is very much on schedule. For those not familiar, the K8L is AMD’s upcoming quad core CPU that will consume no more power than their current dual core solutions at identical speeds. We talked about the requirements for such a solution outside the server market and agreed that it will be a while before four cores are really useful for an everyday usage desktop. Dr. Kadir said that AMD is firmly committed to advancements in technology and ready for an eight-core solution if need be. He also said that AMD continues to focus on performance per watt and not the raw speed of the CPU and welcomed their competitor finally realizing and following this strategy with their new products.

We also spoke about the move to .65nm manufacturing process with the Opteron now moved to it and the Athlon64 line-up following in the next few months. Dr. Kadir emphasized on AMD’s ability to quickly shift to 42nm process in the future.

After that we talked about the AMD/ATI merger and what to expect. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much information from Dr. Kadir on this subject as he said that formal proceedings are yet to finalize with the FCC approval (that came in after this interview) and such and only after that will AMD be able to disclose their exact plans with ATI. He did squash the rumor about ATI not keeping their name after the merger as he rightly believes that ATI has strong brand recognition and it would be unwise to simply kill that.

We also talked about the possibilities that’ll come out of this merger and I felt that one of the primary reasons for the acquisition was growth into the notebook market where Intel enjoys the lion’s share with its Centrino platform. In my opinion, ATI will focus on developing chipsets with integrated video for notebooks for the AMD platform. I also think that this will make AMD a bit more like Intel that provides the complete solution as that’s certainly where the money is, however, Dr. Kadir continued emphasizing on AMD’s intentions on giving the end-user the choice by allowing multiple vendors and partners offering AMD based solutions.

“ATI is the perfect fit.  We are strongly culturally aligned – our companies share a common commitment to customers, innovation and competition. Both companies have a strong foundation with leading employees and a team-oriented focus.  Our strengths and technologies also complement each other.  While AMD has a strong reputation and has made significant gains in the consumer desktop space, ATI’s leadership in the notebook segment – from graphics to chipsets as well as geographically – offer strong growth opportunities for the combined company.”

Lastly, we spoke about AMD’s relationship with nVidia and how the ATI merger will effect this to which Dr. Kadir replied

“Please note that in support of our open standards and open ecosystem philosophy, we will work closely with all of our technology partners, particularly including NVIDIA.  This should give AMD the ability to accelerate time to market and increase overall innovations to hopefully expand opportunities for all business opportunities. 
 
With this acquisition, AMD will be well positioned to drive a unified platform and solution vision that keeps pace with media and data processing innovations, and we will have a strong presence in the fast-growing consumer digital media market.”

So basically nVidia will continue to be a strong partner in the chipset market as well as a strong competitor at the same time in the GPU market. AMD’s comments also make me think that ATI might not focus on high-end discreet chipsets anymore but more on integrated solutions and the CE market. GPU on a CPU sure sounds like it’s in the works.