AMD Joins Retail Education Effort

By Doug Olenick -- TWICE, 5/17/2010

New York - AMD and its OEM partners will launch a major retail marketing program later this year.

The program's goal is to educate consumers on the capabilities of AMD's processors, focusing on how specific chips handle different computing tasks, said Leslie Sobon, AMD's product and platform marketing VP.

"We want to focus on usage over speeds and feeds - experience over technology," she said, adding that focus groups found most people could not translate a processor's specifications to what they wanted to do with a computer.

The program will consist of end caps and additional point-of-sale material. The end caps will feature one of AMD's PC vendor partners and will contain PCs running various demonstrations, such as video editing.

The end caps should also make it easier for sales associates to inform customers what a particular processor is capable of, and it will help store staffers up-sell customers to more powerful machines, said Sobon.

The end caps will be set up and run by the PC makers with support from AMD.

 A trial program will run in May and June with a general rollout slated for later this year. CE retailers such as Best Buy are expected to participate.

AMD did not say whether mass merchants would be included.