AMD says goodbye to their VISION branding?

Pre-CES 2013: Time to focus on the processors again

It seems AMD has decided to say farewell to their short-lived VISION branding, but this change may not benefit the end-users.

You might recall that AMD aimed their VISION branding to focus on the overall platformance and user experience rather than individual components with the first-gen (Llano/Zacate/Ontario/Desna) and second-gen (Trinity/Brazos 2.0/Hondo) APUs. It’s rather odd that AMD appears to be de-emphasizing or even killing off this branding at such an early stage.

With this change, all references to the word VISION will be removed from the logos and the promotional materials for the APU platforms in general and the PC systems using these APU platforms. So previous platform names such as “AMD VISION A10 Technology” will become “AMD A10 Technology”, thereby simplifying things a bit.

But the real question is that since this change only scratches the surface and the underlying issues were still not addressed, with the new processors on the horizon, where will things go? It’s becoming more and more complicated, for example the whole “Trinity 2.0” branding that has been floating around…

AMD now has the following brands:

AMD FX platform
AMD A10 platform
AMD A8 platform
AMD A6 platform
AMD A4 platform
AMD E2 platform
AMD E1 platform
AMD Athlon platform (taking care of the bins without the GPU, as always)
AMD PRO platform

And AMD will soon add the following products to the mix:

Vishera: FX
Richland: A10/A8/Athlon/PRO (socket APUs and BGA ULV APUs)
Kabini: A6/A4/E2/E1 (BGA only. So, AMD is going to make more then 90% of their notebook APUs without a socket. High hopes for Jaguar?)
Temash as well if it is another die, or even brand.

At the end, the move to the new branding doesn’t benefit the customers much, or help to make better purchase decisions. Besides the respective price points for different APU platforms, nothing substantial is achieved with this purely marketing decision. That said, it is a bit simpler and easier, so we can’t complain all that much.S|A

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Leo Yim

Author at SemiAccurate
Leo Yim is our correspondent from the far flung reaches of East Asia. Fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and English he'd rather be talking about computers no matter what language. A true detail man he dreams of building gaming rigs from workstation class parts.