AMD 2007 Annual Report Download - page 19

Table of Contents
Competition in the Chipset Market
In the chipset market, our competitors include suppliers of integrated graphics chipsets. PC manufacturers are increasingly choosing to use integrated
chipsets, particularly for notebook computers, over discrete GPUs because integrated chipsets can cost significantly less than discrete GPUs while offering
acceptable graphics performance for most mainstream PC users. Intel Corporation manufactures and sells integrated graphics chipsets bundled with their
microprocessors and is a dominant competitor in this market. Should Intel leverage its dominance in the microprocessor market and sell its integrated chipsets, it
could place our integrated chipsets at a competitive disadvantage, such as giving one or more of our competitors in the graphics market, for example, Nvidia
Corporation, preferential access to its proprietary graphics interface or other useful information.
Competition in the Graphics Market
In the graphics market, our competitors include discrete graphics suppliers. Intel has stated that it intends to re-enter the discrete GPU market. This could
shrink the total available market for certain of our discrete GPUs.
Other than Intel, our principal competitor is Nvidia Corporation, and to a lesser extent, Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd., Silicon Integrated Systems Corp.
and Via Technologies, Inc. Other competitors include a number of smaller companies, which may have greater flexibility to address specific market needs, but
lesser financial resources to do so, especially as we believe that the growing complexity of visual processors and the associated research and development costs
represent an increasingly high barrier to entry in this market.
Competition in the Consumer Electronics Market
In the semiconductor market for consumer electronics products we have different competitors in each of our product categories. With respect to our
products for handheld devices, we have three primary categories of competitors: vendors of baseband processors, vendors of applications processors and vendors
of media co-processors. The baseband processor provides the basic voice and communication processing functionality in mobile phones. For certain value
categories of the market, baseband processor vendors are integrating the multimedia processing required for feature-rich mobile phones. Baseband processor
vendors incorporating this basic level of graphics processing include MediaTek Inc., Agere Systems Inc., Broadcom Corporation, Freescale Semiconductor Inc.,
Infineon Technologies AG, NXP Semiconductors, Qualcomm Incorporated and Texas Instruments Incorporated. Another category of competitor, application
processor vendors, target manufacturers of high-end feature and smart phones whose products require large amounts of general purpose processing capability as
well as multimedia processing. These vendors include Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Marvell Technology Group Ltd., Nvidia Corporation, Qualcomm
Incorporated, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., STMicroelectronics N.V. and Texas Instruments Incorporated. The third category of competitor provides dedicated
processors to drive a high level of multimedia functionality. This approach is most comparable to our strategy, and our competitors in this category include Core
Logic Incorporated, Telechips Inc., MTEK Vision Co. Ltd., Nvidia Corporation, Renesas Technology Corp and Imagination Technologies Ltd.
With respect to our products for digital TVs, our primary competitors include Broadcom Corporation, MediaTek Inc., Trident Microsystems, NEC
Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and STMicroelectronics N.V., as well as in-house semiconductor development divisions at companies such as LG
Electronics, Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Samsung and Toshiba Corporation. In the new panel processor market, we compete with Micronas
USA, Inc., NXP Semiconductors, Toshiba Corporation, Trident Microsystems, MediaTek Inc., Pixelworks Inc. and in-house development divisions of Samsung
Electronics Co., Ltd. and Sony.
In the game console category, we compete primarily against Nvidia Corporation. Other competitors include Intel Corporation and IBM.
We license graphics core technologies to other semiconductor manufacturers in the handheld industry. Our primary competitors in this area are
Imagination Technologies Ltd. and ARM Inc.
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Source: ADVANCED MICRO DEVIC, 10-K, February 26, 2008