AMD to enter new markets, including handhelds/PDAs

[Arris]

From Cnet :
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 7, 2002, 9:00 PM PT

The company on Monday will announce that it has newly created the Personal Connectivity Solutions (PCS) group, which will focus on bringing these chips to market. The division is largely the result of AMD's acquisition of Alchemy Semiconductor in February, said Phil Pompa, vice president of marketing for the PCS group. The initial products are based around Alchemy's existing line, and a number of executives and engineers from Austin, Texas-based Alchemy hold chief positions in the group.

Alchemy specializes in energy-efficient chips based around designs from MIPS, the chip spinoff of SGI. MIPS chips compete against processors based around designs from ARM, the king of cell phone chips, and Hitachi. These chips run at slower speeds than PC processors but consume far less energy.

While the group will initially concentrate on expanding Alchemy's Au line of processors, AMD also plans to move into the market for chips for 802.11 wireless networking systems and other components necessary for building consumer-electronics products. The group will work closely with AMD's flash-memory division, one of the company's two dominant businesses.

Don't AMD have enough on their hands fighting with Intel in the desktop/laptop CPU arena. With AMD aspiring to enter several new markets can we read into this an underlying confidence in their existing ones? I guess that AMD have a strong enough following to guarentee at least some sales of products in these new markets to warrant the risk.

Heres AMD's press release concerning this venture

From www.amd.com:

About the Alchemy™ Au1100™ processor from AMD
When Alchemy Semiconductor, Inc. was acquired by AMD in February of this year, its product portfolio consisted of the Au1000 and Au1500™ processors. The Au1000 processor is currently in production and the Au1500 processor is sampling, with production scheduled for the second quarter of 2002. The Au1100 processor builds upon the successful Alchemy Au1 core, which is based on a MIPS32™ instruction set. Like the Au1000 and Au1500 processors, the Au1100 is a System-on-a-Chip (SOC). SOC is a processor that has a core around which there are a custom set of integrated memory controllers and industry standard communication interfaces. SOCs can be tailored for use in different information appliances, such as PDAs and web tablets.