The Platform Story, bleh

This has come up enough times in meetings with manufacturers that I think I need to address it publicly, since it's not something that I think is normally exposed.

When Intel launched Centrino, its competitors saw dollar-signs. Intel managed to brand a bunch of its own chips under a new name, called it a platform, and made a ton of money. Obviously it wasn't that simple, prior to Centrino the mobile market was honestly a mess. Wireless was far from a standard feature, and Intel's own mobile processors were severely lacking (mobile Pentium 4? Really?), not to mention issues with 3rd party chipset vendors and their drivers. Centrino put together a really good mobile CPU, with a decent chipset and wireless, it was a platform that actually did something.

Since then, everyone has tried to reproduce the success of Centrino - including Intel. Viiv, Centrino for the home, was such an attempt but quite flawed in execution. VPro, Intel's business platform, is a bit better because it actually offers tangible and useful features, but still not as widely accepted as Centrino.

Once you get outside Intel, then the attempts at cloning Centrino become even more pathetic. These days, there are folks within AMD and NVIDIA who want to turn each company into a platform company. We've actually been asked on a few occasions to review products as a part of a platform, rather than individual components to somehow showcase these magical synergies that exist between products.

The NVIDIA platform is a stretch these days; NVIDIA's motherboard + GPU combo are the primary parts of the platform, which is why snide remarks usually come from AMD/Intel whenever we talk about NVIDIA's "platform". From their view, a platform isn't a platform without a CPU.

Thus, AMD's platform is far more complete since the ATI acquisition as it now has a CPU, motherboard/chipset and GPU to offer. Furthering this logic, AMD's platform is arguably more attractive than Intel's because of superior graphics. It almost hurt to write that.

Here's the problem, while the platform story may be a good one to sell to OEMs, at the end of the day users want the best CPU, the best chipset and the best video card. Unless you can offer a bundle of three that provides an actual benefit to the end user, there is no platform to speak of. Centrino works because you can still have a Centrino branded notebook with ATI or NVIDIA graphics; you can't have a NVIDIA platform with an ATI GPU. What about chipset flexibility with Centrino? Sure, there is none, but there's not much value from alternative chipsets in the mobile space. You just need something that works, the important part is in the graphics where you do get an option. Centrino isn't the perfect platform, nor the ideal one, but attempting to recreate the platform story by simply bundling a desktop motherboard, graphics card and CPU together just isn't going to work.

Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to review AMD/ATI graphics cards only on AMD motherboards and compare them to NVIDIA graphics cards on NVIDIA motherboards? Goodbye scientific method.

Despite the obvious issues, there's constant pressure to review everything in this platform fashion and while I understand the desire for these companies to make money (selling 3 chips is better than just one), it just wouldn't fly for what we do. This post has two purposes, one to give you a glimpse of the kinds of discussions that often happen while meeting with manufacturers, and one to answer a question I'm often asked while meeting with those manufacturers.

Hope it helped.