AMD to aim for business market in 2003

Advanced Micro Devices will heavily target the corporate market in 2003 in an effort to pull itself back to profitability, company executives said Thursday. Additionally, the company confirmed it will begin to lay off employees this quarter and try to reduce expenses by $100 million per quarter by the second quarter of 2003.

"It will be a significant number," AMD chief executive Hector Ruiz said at a meeting for analysts. "For us to meet our tough (cost saving) projections, it is inevitable that people go with that."

Although AMD will continue to defend its position in the consumer market, the company will put most of its energy into getting its chips into servers, corporate desktops, and "thin and light" notebooks, executives said at AMD's annual analyst meeting.

A new version of the company's Athlon chip for thin notebooks, the most popular kind shipped to corporations, will be sent out to manufacturers this quarter, said Rob Herb, senior vice president of sales and marketing. Notebooks featuring the chip will appear in the first quarter.

The new chip is architecturally similar to current AMD mobile chips but comes in a thinner package and consumes between 16 watts and 25 watts, less than other AMD mobile chips, he said. Roughly 74 percent of notebooks sold to corporations are thin and lights, Herb added, and half the volume of notebooks from the big three manufacturers--Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell Computer--fit into this category

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