AMD's CTO stumps for company's intellectual property

AMD CTO Mark Papermaster appears to want the chip maker to be valued more on its intellectual property.

And why not? It's a bull market for patents these days.

In a talk at the Jefferies global technology and telecom conference in New York, Papermaster outlined the AMD intellectual property case. Papermaster was a former executive at IBM and Apple.

Consider Papermaster's money quotes:

AMD has got a rich tradition of innovation. It's got a deep talent bench. This is what really attracted me to join AMD last year.

And if you look at what we're focused on doing, it is exactly leveraging that base. And leveraging, not only that technology, but the relationships with the ODMs and the OEMs and bringing that to market, and the deep platform and software skills we have around that IP.What we're changing is how we bringing that together, right. How we architect bringing those IP's pieces together from a methodology standpoint and a true system-on-a-chip methodology and really marrying that strategy with what's going on in the industry, because it's pretty clear the changes that we see every day, I see in front of each of you tablets, you've got smartphones, you've got your PCs. And what's your expectation? Your expectation is, you can get it that same data that you need, both your work life, your personal life.

We're focused on both that consumer experience and then what's going on to compute in the back office. And our value proposition is very clear. Leverage that CPU, that GPU all of the IP, the multimedia, the high-speed memory accesses, each of the IP that we're developing over the years, but bring it incredibly focused on those segments that we are targeting and change the rate at which we can bring that value to our customers, not only the rate and speed at which we deliver it, but how we tailor that differentiation.

And then there's more IP chatter from Papermaster.

AMD has been around over 40 years, and so we've been developing a rich, rich treasure trove, I call it, of IP. And you think of us as CPU, and you know from the ATI acquisition some years ago, about the rich graphics capability.

From there, Papermaster touted AMD's:

• System on a chip intellectual property;
• IP for embedded applications;
• And memory management.

Add it up and Papermaster pitched AMD as a company that can do custom systems for customers. Papermaster stopped short of calling AMD an IP company completely.

He said:

You look at our products today, they are a systems capability. We have a very long -- largest software investment. We have -- a deep platform investment we have. And so our customers are looking at us to bring together this IP, bring together the enablement around it, and what this approach that we're taking, this ambidextrous approach, is allows us to say yes, when, in addition to our offerings that we have in the markets that we play in today, that there is growth opportunities to be able to allow our customers to differentiate with our technology.

OK, so AMD is a so-called "solutions company," but it sure sounds like one that wants to be valued for its patents.