Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Windsock]

You have identified the start of trademark awareness by Intel to establish brand awareness at the end user level. Prior to the 386 era, the OEMs were considered the focus of marketing efforts.

At the time, AMD was making 386 and then 486 processors that were direct copies of Intel designs. OEMs knew the difference between AMD and Intel as a source. Intel wanted to distinguish its processors in the minds of the end users to develop a brand preference for Intel processors.

The first attempt involved trying to establish trademark rights in 386. However, the name had become generic to identify the processor and the efforts failed. This led to the Intel Inside logo campaign to place the logo on PCs where a brand recognition and preference was established with end users.

An Intel coop marketing plan provided incentives to OEMs to place the logo on their products. Absent the coop plan Dell, Compaq, IBM and others had no self interest in affixing the Intel Inside logo but the money offered the logo was sufficient incentive to get space for the logo.

The next step in the developing awareness was Pentium, then Celeron and the rest is history.

AMD followed a somewhat different path using K6 and K7. The trademarks Athlon, Duron, Opteron and Sempron followed for AMD.

AMD marketing suggested somewhat disingenuously, that the K6 was a sixth generation processor vs the fifth generation Intel Pentium processor. Intel stopped using designations such as P5 and P6 for processor designs and began the use of code names. This impaired the ability of AMD to compare generations.