AMD in 2012: Cloudy With a Chance of Tablets

AMD just sent out its invitations for its 2012 analyst day, which was originally scheduled to take place in November, but was moved to February 2, 2012.

AMD traditionally updates customers, the press and its customers with a full day worth of presentations and meetings about the company's strategy in the immediate future. While we do not know yet what the content will be in detail, the invitation shows a tablet that is connecting to cloud applications. The topic of the event is "Consumerization", "Cloud" and "Convergence".

Of course, the hint is that AMD will be aiming to cover the cloud aspect with its high-end processors, and convergence would be referring to multiple platforms growing into one. However, the consumerization aspect is the interesting one for AMD. Typically, we refer to consumerization as a trend that first emerges in the consumer world and then makes its way into business, which is quite different from what we have seen in the IT industry in the past when technologies trickled down from businesses to the consumer.

Tablets are the obvious technology AMD will be aiming for with new products we should be seeing in 2012. This may be a shift from a previous note provided by CEO Rory Read during the Q3 earnings call, when he said that he was not "sure the tablet just in the form factor itself is the real game in hand" and indicated that AMD may be looking at different form factors.

What we know for sure is that Read is cracking down on manufacturing, which should enable AMD to execute on its roadmap much better than it has been the case this year. Expect a number of announcements that will especially address greater flexibility of processor production.