Joseph Pareti. Re: AMD's Athlon. Here's a piece from today's WSJ on the Athlon chip/toilet partition.
HL
Athlon (ath'lon) n 1. computer chip
2. material used in toilet partitions
By DEAN TAKAHASHI
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When consumers begin hearing the word "Athlon" in computer ads this month, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. hopes they will connect it with AMD's new microprocessor. The name was picked because it sounded a bit like "athlete," with connotations of speed and power.
AMD is not as keen about a different association, with a material used in partitions that separate toilets in office bathrooms. It turns out that Athlon is a trademark registered to Trespa North America Ltd., a maker of office partitions in Poway, Calif., and a unit of the Dutch conglomerate Trespa International NV.
Drew Prairie, a spokesman for AMD in Sunnyvale, Calif., says his company knew about Trespa's trademark on Athlon, but the company's lawyers concluded there would be no confusion if it used the name to replace the code name K7 on its flagship chip. To be on the safe side, AMD registered the name AMD Athlon as the official name of the chip, which will make its debut in computers from Compaq Computer Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. in September.
"The lawyers felt that bathroom partitions and microprocessors were very different markets," Mr. Prairie says.
John Bowser, a spokesman for Trespa, says his company isn't happy about AMD's use of "Athlon" and is exploring its options. He expressed concern that customers might mix up the names and wonder if his company might be the copycat. "I think that AMD didn't do its homework," he says.
Confusion among potential customers isn't likely, argues Mark Radcliffe, a patent attorney at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich in Palo Alto, Calif. But he notes that companies in different industries are more likely now to complain about conflicting trademarks, because searchers on the Web might run into both brands.
"We're living in brand Bosnia, with lots of little brands all over the place," says Fred Hoar, a longtime Silicon Valley high-tech marketer at Miller/Shandwick public relations. "Most of the good names are gone."
Craig Barrett, chief executive officer of AMD's archrival Intel Corp., sometimes mentions Athlon as "a.k.a. the bathroom partition." But Linley Gwennap, an analyst at Micro Design Resources Inc., recalls that Intel's "Pentium" once sounded funny to a lot of people. Industry wags are now making fun of Intel's Celeron chip, which has been nicknamed Celery.
As for AMD, Mr. Gwennap thinks it wise to get away from the K-series nomenclature. Punsters were already preparing jokes about how a K9 chip could be "slow as a dog."
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