Anno Dominni 2009 may prove to be critical for two companies in the business. The value of positive PR is immense, and AMD and Microsoft are currently enjoying some good press and blogging coverage. Microsoft got a lot of positive PR for initial versions of Windows 7, and the company is now pushing to get the Windows 7 out before Back-to-school season.

In case of AMD, the company enjoyed good press ever since that infamous meeting in Salamander HQ in Austin, TX. Macci, Famous finnish overclocker and current AMD’s employee was able to achieve almost 6.3 GHz clock running the B2 silicon (same that ended up in millions of CPUs on the market). At a now famous balloon challenge at CES, AMD scored even higher and that yielded some very impressive comments from the overclocking community.

As it usually happens, good PR is worth a pot of gold, while conventional advertising is worth “dozen a dime”;, and this success automatically translated into good sales. According to our sources from the world of motherboards, AMD achieved large boost in motherboard production. A smaller Taiwanese player told us that AMD went from 8% of their product mix to 24% in a period of a single quarter. This is not the only good news… we spoke with representatives from major motherboard vendors, and they too confirmed that the interest and more importantly, orders for AMD sparked interest and now R&D teams are focusing on improving AMD platform… some of these improvements are already on the market in a form of “buy Phenom X3 with 4MB of cache and get 2 more for free”; – but they’re nowhere near from being done with the platform.

We also received news about Leo platform (successor of current Dragon platform), which should have the ability to overclock the mGPU all the way to 1GHz using decent cooling… for integrated graphics part, we’re impressed.

Getting back on the subject, we spoke with one [System Integrator] in the US and four vendors in EMEA region. All four vendors saw a large increase in AMD orders, and in the case of two vendors in EUrope, we have the case of AMD going from 10-15% to 30-35% of overall product mix. Since we’re talking about thousands of machines, bean counters in AMD should be really happy about this turn of events.

As they say, competition rocks. And we’re really glad that AMD finally realizes that enthusiasts are their core market and that by dissing overclockers, you’re dissing future and current system administrators and ultimately, purchase deciders. Good morning AMD, nice to have you back.