eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Shopping for a PC tends to boil down to price points, instead of the features and speeds that consumers get for their money. Advanced Micro Devices is looking to change that by rolling out a program that translates its long lists of gigabytes, processor names and gigahertz speeds into, more simply, umbrella ideas of the benefits each can offer.
AMD’s Vision Technology program simplifies its 22 sprawling product lines into three far-more manageable categories: Vision Basic, Vision Premium and Vision Ultimate. It’s not so much a “good, better, best” as it is a way of making clear what the PC can do, and making sure that that’s in line with the consumer’s hopes for it.
Leslie Sobon, AMD’s vice president of product and platform marketing, described a big-box-store environment where customers are relying on salespeople, who are often just kids home from college.
If the salesperson doesn’t know enough about the products to explain the particular benefits tied to a higher price point, the customer could leave having paid a price they’re thrilled about but with a machine that won’t, for example, offer the speed he or she is looking for to watch HD videos – while the retailer also misses out on the opportunity to upsell.
AMD’s Vision Technology, Sobon told eWEEK, is “a bold and much better way to communicate with mainstream customers in a retail environment.” It gives retailers a way, she said, of tying usage to upsell.
As part of its plan to translate the combined processing power of CPUs and GPUs (graphics processor unit) to mainstream PC users, AMD plans to use labels with “See,” “Share” and “Create” to simplify whether a device is, for example, more ideal for casual gaming and listening to music, versus watching Blu-ray movies.
“Today’s consumer cares about what they can do with their PC, not what’s inside,” Nigel Dessau, AMD’s chief marketing officer, wrote in a statement. “They want a rich HD and entertainment experience on their PC, delivered by the combined technology of AMD CPUs and GPUs, without having to understand what gigahertz and gigabytes mean. Vision technology reflects the maturation of marketing in the PC processing industry and communicates the technology in a more meaningful way.”
Notebooks with Vision technology will be widely available for the holiday season, arriving with the release of the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system, which is said to highly complement the Vision technology, in part by supporting DirectX 10, Direct X10.1 and Direct X11 for richer 3-D details on games and similar media apps.
In the first quarter of 2010, AMD plans to introduce a fourth level, Vision Black, which will identify the highest level of computing capabilities, generally for desktop PCs.