AMD acts over reliability concerns

AMD today announced a new worldwide scheme to allay fears about the reliability of Athlon and Duron PCs.

The AMD Assured Program, announced at the Fall System Builder Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, is intended to help builders of Athlon and Duron based systems identify motherboards which have passed AMD's testing criteria.

Mobos must pass extensive electrical and compatibility testing and the manufacturers must agree to maintain a reasonable supply of the approved boards. Once they have passed the tests, approved motherboards will qualify only so long as the board's design or components are not altered - any modifications mean the mobo must be retested.

"The AMD Assured program is another example of AMD working with its customers and partners to bring about a complete, stable PC platform," said David Somo, AMD vice president of marketing. "With this new program, system builders and VARs can build Athlon and Duron processor-based systems with the confidence that they are using quality motherboards that meet the testing standards specified by the AMD Assured program."

The AMD Assured scheme is open to motherboard manufacturers around the world. To date, Gigabyte and MSI have each qualified a motherboard under the scheme. The AMD Assured program's electrical and compatibility testing is extensive, and includes EMI scanning and standard benchmarking.

Each board is tested to the Microsoft WHQL and Novell standards, and must pass tests on a variety of standard corporate suites including Microsoft Office 2000 and Corel Office 2000, as well as operating system testing on Microsoft Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Unix, Linux, Solaris and BeOS.

In the future, AMD plans to add additional testing on further applications including AutoDesk, AutoCAD 2000, Adobe PhotoShop 5.5, Adobe Illustrator 8, Visual C++ 6.0, Visual Basic 6.0 and Borland Turbo C++.

"Gigabyte is proud to be one of the original participants in the AMD Assured Program," said Jack Ko, Gigabyte vice president of Worldwide Sales & Marketing. "By submitting our motherboards to AMD for testing, we are showing our commitment to providing the market with reliable, compatible and readily available motherboards."

"We think AMD is doing the right thing by undertaking a program to raise standards for motherboards used in AMD processor-based systems," added Calvin Wu, president of MSI. ®