Competition for You
Over the past decade, technology users have seen exciting choices in new products and applications—helping to deliver faster and more reliable services in both business and daily lives. And while challenges in this dynamic marketplace have caused some technology companies to retreat or fold, AMD today is the strongest we’ve ever been.
From our products, to our culture, to our corporate leadership—AMD has grown smarter, more agile, and more responsive by taking on the best players and hardest problems in our business and striving to help you achieve your goals.
Benefits of Competition
Whether it’s in the world of sports or business—competition should be healthy, empowering, and engaging. On a level playing field, where contestants put into action their talent, preparation, and tenacity—the spirit of competition is what drives personal bests, record achievements, and historic accomplishments.
As a business leader, embracing the benefits of true competition in your procurement processes and purchasing decisions helps your organization be more competitive, in turn expanding your access to cutting-edge technologies that other organizations and competitors are using.
Growing beyond the PC market
Our newest innovations expand your capabilities in emerging fields such as immersive and instinctive computing, data analytics, and more. This helps drive breakthroughs for customer service, total cost of ownership, security, and reliability in AMD-based solutions. And while we’re proud of these achievements, our collective success as an industry will be what pulls everyone forward into the next revolutionary era of computing.
Achieving greater value within tighter budgets
Competition helps you get the best price/performance for your organization’s budget, matched to your specific needs—which is especially important when it comes to responsibly spending public monies.
Strengthening local tech-dependent industries
Real competitive choice creates checks and balances on pricing, but also (and more importantly) enhances the quality, unique features, and availability of custom-tailored solutions—for both you and your customers.
Public Procurement
Government procurement policies around the world are embracing component-level competitive requirements. This is because certain parts—higher-cost, critical-function components—need separate purchasing consideration to provide the best possible competitive choice and value for public investments.
For example, both Boeing and Airbus make jet planes for the commercial airline industry. The engines in their designs are the largest cost components—and those are made by different third-party suppliers (e.g., IAE, Pratt & Whitney, GE). Because the features, efficiency, and cost of a particular engine model make a major impact on the plane’s overall competitive value, this component deserves its own specific and careful vetting.
In the computing world, OEMs are the plane manufacturers while microprocessor companies are the engine makers. The CPUs and GPUs in a laptop, desktop or server similarly define core capabilities, features, and overall system cost.
Specifications, Benchmarks & Proprietary Standards
To gain the true benefits of competition, the selection of specifications, benchmarks, and standards used to define your procurement criteria must be unbiased. Evaluation of component operations must be without partiality or proprietary exclusion. Ideally, scoring and specification requirements should also reflect the actual workload needs of your specific environment.
Compliance
In many countries and regions, component-level competition is already part of the regulatory landscape. Voluntary compliance with these regulations not only affords you the benefits of competitive choice, but also supports a transparent and auditable process to help avoid risk of scrutiny or challenges down the road.
Tender Best Practices
- Never use brand or product names. This may be prohibited by applicable law, and it significantly narrows competition and choice.
- Always use open standards to describe technical requirements. Proprietary standards not only significantly narrow competition and choice, they also generate lock-in effects which reduce or eliminate flexibility during the product lifecycle.
- Use benchmarks to describe personal computer system performance. Benchmarks need to be relevant and specific to your user scenario (i.e. use office benchmarks such as Futuremark® PCMark® to evaluate performance using typical office applications). If you can, use more than one benchmark.
- Never use technical requirements that are specific to certain products (i.e. memory and bus technologies, cache sizes, clock frequencies, process technologies (nanometers), proprietary system management utilities (i.e. Intel® vPro™) or feature sets or proprietary docking technologies for laptops).
International Policy Map
European Union: EU Procurement Directive 2014/24/EU
UK: Guide to EU Public Procurement
India: Procurement Directive issued by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology
Singapore: Ministry of Finance Procurement Handbook
Legal History
AMD has a long history as a champion of transparent competitive industry practices and voluntary compliance. We cooperate with the appropriate regulatory entities around the world to assure that organizations and consumers are protected and getting the best options to freely choose from without interference.
Intel Antitrust Rulings
On November 12, 2009 AMD and Intel Corporation announced a comprehensive settlement agreement to end all outstanding legal disputes between the companies, including antitrust and patent cross license disputes. In addition to a payment of $1.25B that Intel made to AMD, Intel agreed to abide by an important set of ground rules that continue in effect until November 11, 2019. Intel also entered into a Consent Decree with the United States Federal Trade Commission in October of 2010 that continues in effect until October 29, 2020 that imposes further restrictions and requirements intended to foster competition in the x86 semiconductor market.