In a follow-up to earlier comments by a company representative regarding future strategy for AMD, CEO Rory Read was recently quoted as saying that there’s enough processing power on every laptop on the planet today. He’s specifically referring to what he calls the conclusion of the era between AMD and Intel to develop increasingly faster processors.
Late last year AMD spokesperson Mike Silverman told the San Jose Mercury News that his company needed to let go of the old AMD versus Intel mindset because as technology moves forward, that strategy will no longer be the key focus.
To further back up this belief, Read told Bloomberg Businessweek that computing is increasingly moving to the cloud where data centers are able to process computations much faster than a single computer, tablet or smartphone can. Instead, he feels that there will be a need for chips that are better at handing various media rather than processing raw data.
Taken literally, the statement is already being compared to the short-sighted quote that some claim Bill Gates said during a computer trade show in 1981. Gates allegedly told those in attendance that “640K ought to be enough for anybody,” referring to the memory limit of the recently-announced IBM PC. For what it’s worth, researchers have been unable to verify its authenticity and Gates himself even denies he ever said it.
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time," Gates said. "I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.”
