TAIPEI, Taiwan － The rumor has it again that AMD is going to offer for sale and Microsoft will likely takeover it, Samsung also intent to play a part in it. Should PC brands worry about the acquisition?
According to Fudzilla, an tech news website, Microsoft is seriously discussing with AMD about the merging affairs but the process is still ongoing with uncertainty.
If Microsoft obtains the design and manufacturing ability of CPU or GPU, the pace of broadening its PC market share will be able to accelerate. And that might further influence the PC brands, such as Lenovo, Asus and Acer.
According to Microsoft's blueprint, moving toward the integration of hardware and software is already a firm policy, including the introduction of Surface and acquisition of Nokia, there will be more own-brand hardware products be introduced in the future. Therefore, it is indeed necessary to acquire self-own processor technology. If Microsoft acquires of AMD, that will increase Microsoft's hardware resource, and will certainly affect existing PC brands.
In fact, Microsoft launched its own hardware products from long time ago, including MP3 Players, tablet PCs, smartphones, most of it were not been successful, sales were all very low. Two major factors are that Microsoft has no free to choose software platforms, and lack of abilities of hardware designing, compare to PC brands.
Therefore, for PC brands, it do have impact if Microsoft acquires AMD, but the impact will be very slight. Because of PC brands have free to choose diverse software platforms, and do not have to stick with some particular hardware technologies. They have more choices in terms of market strategy. Acer’s Chromebook is an good example.
However, Microsoft can still draw on AMD’s ability of graphics chip to strengthen the performance of its Xbox game console, and expand market influence.
About this rumor, Taiwanese PC brands Asus and Acer all said that they have deep partnerships with Microsoft, did not see any impact from this unconfirmed acquisition.
