By Noel Randewich

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – PC chipmaker AMD’s chief executive is betting that its larger rival Intel has overestimated consumers’ willingness to pay top dollar for a new category of premium laptops.

Riding the coat-tails of Intel’s most expensive marketing push in a decade, new processors from AMD have been chosen for a handful of upcoming laptops in a wave of sleek personal computers with features like “instant on” made popular by tablets.

Targeting mainstream shoppers, thin laptops with AMD’s chips, previously code named Trinity, are set to sell in the $600 range, similar to many of the bulkier laptops now on the market and significantly cheaper than the high-end, Intel-powered ones increasingly appearing in stores.

“It seems like an opportunity to steal the bacon and go in there and capture this huge opportunity that someone else generated,” AMD Chief Executive Rory Read told Reuters in an interview. “They missed where the sweet spot of the market was.”

Intel has coined “Ultrabooks” to refer to svelte laptops using its processors, with high-quality features like solid-state drives and metal cases.

(Reporting By Noel Randewich; editing by Gunna Dickson)

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