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Intel’s Northern Europe boss Pat Bliemer said that average consumers continue to favor graphics cards, despite the leaps in performance from Intel and AMD.
Speaking in an interview with Nordic Hardware, Bliemer was pressed on chipmaker rival AMD’s LLano and Brazos APU success in the low-end notebook area and whether the chip giant intends a fight back in graphics performance.
Bliemer chose to deflect away from the performance issue, saying: "I would say that the biggest thing that we’re up against is perception. And it’s not as much as actual performance or that ours is not as good as theirs or vice versa."
Making reference to the combatively weak CPU performance of AMD’s AMUs, Bliemer said that consumers still believed they needed a discreet graphics card, adding: "I think this applies as much to AMD as it does to us right?"
Bliemer had earlier said that "AMD is and will always be a serious competitor" but said that Intel’s dominance in manufacturing technology meant that AMD was forced to compete on price.
"I think that from a performance and experience point of view it is not much for them right now to really pleased about I think."
One take on Bliemer’s comments is that he is suggesting that the graphics prowess of AMD’s APUs had nothing to do with the firm’s market success in low end notebooks since consumers believe that good graphics only come in discreet graphics solutions.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Bliemer painted the requirements of mainstream gaming as fitting within the capabilities of Intel’s HD 3000 integrated graphics while serious gamers "have the need for external graphics."
It seems ironic that a large part of the perception issue of integrated graphics performances stems from the poor performance of Intel’s earlier integrated graphics.
