Chipset vendor Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is hiring Android driver development engineers, marking the company’s move into the tablet and smartphone space. The move may be a wise one indeed, considering that market research outfit Gartner expects tablet sales to jump from 70 million units this year to around 294 million units by 2015. Smartphones are expected to reach around 850 million units in that timeframe.
Hiring Android developers indicates the possibility of an AMD powered tablet or notebook in the near future running Android.
A job post on the AMD website reads: “The Linux Base Graphics team is looking for Android Driver Development engineers to help us evolve our driver stack for new platforms and in line with the development trends in the Android ecosystem. Experience with video decodes acceleration within the Android Web browser or video player application would be an asset.”
Android has seen explosive growth over the past couple of years with manufacturers shipping 33.3 million Android phones worldwide, according to United Kingdom-based market research firm Canalys. ComScore puts Google Inc.’s Android as the top smartphone OS beating out Research In Motion Ltd. and Apple Inc. who hold the second and third positions.
AMD’s venture into the tablet and smartphone space will create a particularly interest challenge for Intel Corp., whose Atom plans fail to die, despite the company’s lack of success in the telecoms space. Atom processors already support Android but may not stack up to AMD’s Fusion-based processors, which also boast low power but also sport decent graphics.
By hiring staff to create Android drivers for its Fusion line-up, AMD believes it may have an edge when it comes to its Brazos chip offerings, from both a price and performance standpoint.
This is bad news for Intel which also has an uphill battle to fight in pitting its Oak Trail Atom chips against British chip maker ARM’s offerings. Even if AMD and Intel manage to get Android 3.0 Honeycomb up and running on their respective platforms, the pair will still have to face off with powerful ARM partners like Nvidia Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. That’s a lot for the X86 chipmakers to prove on the battery life front.
“If AMD can create even half of [the $4.3 billion Atom is worth] for itself from some success in the mobile computing market (netbooks, smartphones, tablets, etc.), it could lead to an upside of as much as 30% to its current price estimate,” Stock analysis firm Trefis said.
