Counting the foolish efforts

AMD has recently setup ticker display billboards in Times Square in New York City and along Route 101 in California's Silicon Valley. According to Brent Kerby, AMD's product marketing manager for Opteron, the display shows a theoretical electric bill representing the worldwide cost incurred by companies running servers with Intel's Xeon chips instead of AMD's Opteron chips. Currently the amount exceeds $1 billion, aggregating $24 roughly per second.

The locations that AMD has chosen to display the tickers are very strategic. One billboard is situated in Times Square only blocks away from the debt clock that inspired it. The other is along U.S. Highway 101, in a spot where it is sure to be seen by Silicon Valley executives on their daily commute.

According to Nathan Brookwood, head of market research outfit Insight64, in Saratoga, California AMD has the advantage over Intel on power consumption, at least for now. Over the last two years AMD processors have been using a lot less power than Intel's.

AMD has started playing the same game excelling in which Intel has managed to keep majority consumers away from AMD processors which undoubtebly outperform their counterparts. But AMD has still got to learn a lot more about marketing. In the words of Jim McGregor, analyst with InStat/MDR "If AMD can learn one thing from Intel, it's about how best to use its resources toward effective marketing. AMD may have learned to be a technology leader, but it hasn't learned how to be a market leader. There's a big difference."