Fool Fight: AMD vs. Intel
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Can the king of chip ka-ching beat back its uppity rival? Fools face off.
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Intel racked up some serious karmic debt when it schemed to run AMD out of the PC processor business. Xeon now languishes in Opteronâs shadow, which strikes me as just desserts for some nasty business.
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It's a big day for AMD, which is launching its Barcelona chip at last. Then Intel comes along with an earnings surprise.
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(InfoWorld) - The leading quote from this weekâs news comes from Intel CEO Paul Otellini: "We're doing product refreshes every two years, which is the model we invented and then stopped doing after Pentium 4, shame on us," Otellini said. "We fell off it -- mea culpa, we screwed up -- and now we're back on that pace." Otellini was speaking at a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, but regardless of the venue, every time a CEO speaks, he or she is using analysts and journalists as a conduit to shareholders. When a CEO takes a podium to apologize to shareholders, it tends to be the board of directorsâ idea. This is an obtuse, though profuse apology. The screwup to which Otellini refers is his decision to clear Intelâs shelves of x86 property and dump it on AMD in one drop so that Intel could end the year with a bang, having had the last volley in the CPU wars. It did that. But one could liken Intelâs strategy in latter 2006 to a massive spread of fireworks thatâs sent up simultaneously. Everybody goes nuts at the spectacle of it, but after that brief rush, all thatâs left is silence and smoke, soon followed by the glow of taillights. As tacky as it is to quote oneself, I put Otelliniâs present bind succinctly in a column I wrote last August: âIntel shot its entire wad on Core microarchitecture. From here, the only place Intel can go is bigger cache, more cores, and faster clocks.â Indeed, that sums up Intelâs plans for 2007, and thereâs no swaggering spin, distraction, or buzzword bending that can make up for the enormous technology gap between Core 2 and AMDâs reengineered Barcelona quad-core Opteron. It isnât likely that Intel can play engineering catch-up, given that Otellini has pink-slipped 10,500 workers. Otellini will have more than empty cupboards and empty desks to apologize for. He set a strategy to bulk up Intelâs manufacturing capacity and to jam up AMD by forcing prices down and leaving AMD unable to meet spiked market demand. Market demand is sagging, and if it returns, AMD has the capacity advantage: It has third-party foundries standing ready to stamp out AMD CPUs if need be. Another example of poor judgment is Otelliniâs fixation on CPUs and chip sets. AMDâs acquisition of ATI put Intelâs rival in the high-margin peripherals business as well as a growing role in high-performance chip sets for Intel desktop and notebook PCs. Intelâs hostile attitude toward chip-set makers drove graphics and chip-set giant Nvidia to make surprisingly close ties with AMD despite its purchase of Nvidiaâs sole competitor. If only it ended there. Recently, Intel informed the Delaware Federal District Court that it cannot produce relevant e-mail messages that were exchanged after the filing date of AMDâs antitrust suit. Intelâs letter to the court blames individual human error while heaping detailed praise on executivesâ document retention plan. Buried in the text is the Nixonian counterpoint, âSome of the tapes appear to have been recycled.â Itâs not that Otellini hasnât done anything right. He did put the brakes on NetBurst. He won an exclusive with Apple and got Sun Microsystems to add Intel to its product line. But in the minus column, Otellini lost the companyâs gold medal exclusive PC maker, Dell, and people will wonder whose inboxes those recycled tapes might have contained. Intelâs CEO should be gilding his parachute. If he lasts out the year, it will be because Intelâs board wisely takes its time to choose a replacement. My litmus test? Find someone who believes that Intelâs yearly sponsorship of the A. M. Turing Award matters more than convincing a judge in Delaware that evidence really, truly got lost. And find a CEO who, when he or she apologizes for lousy decisions, uses the pronouns âIâ and âme.â
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When Fully buffered DIMMs attack A recent benchmark comparing quad-core chips asserts that Intel Xeon-based servers have an edge in performance but are complete power hogs when compared to the dainty energy appetite of AMD Opteron-based servers.â¦
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Most, if not all, of you have read or been in heated debates over why or why not higher clocked microprocessors are better than their &quot;comparable&quot; competition.
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Eyeing Sun's Niagara flow Intel has confirmed plans to "tick" and "tock" AMD into submission.â¦
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Intel's release this week of the 'Tigerton' Xeon 7300 chip is challenged by AMD's contention that the tech is merely packaged dual-cores, and not native quad-core.
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After a bout of good fortune, AMD finds itself coming to grips with a resurgent Intel. Plus: Can software keep up with multicore technology?
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Once more, with feeling: Why is AMD on the lam, and how can it get back up?
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In search of life raft AMD, Intel's on-again, off-again rival, has given another example how it's mostly been off again over the past year, disclosing plans to take a "material" goodwill impairment charge for its $5.6bn acquisition of ATI Technologies.â¦
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Pressure on to get 'Barcelona' out Intel has recaptured all the market share it lost to AMD last year during the two rival chip makers' battle for supremacy in the Windows workstation arena, the latest market stats show.â¦
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Getting coarse with Intel AMD's elaborate and lengthy four-core processor striptease continues this week with some geeky revelations around power saving technology.â¦
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Race for bragging rights favors Intel again -- for now. But AMD is fighting back with a workaround it says will keep  it in the running until it can bring out its own quad core. By Dan Goodin.
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Intel still the Bryan Adams of silicon AMD can kiss goodbye to its scrappy underdog status after forcing its way into the world chip rankings top 10 for the first time.â¦
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Well, Intel did say - dismissively of course - that wasn&#39;t going to try to match AMD&#39;s little dual-core Opteron demo coup of last week and show off a dual-core Xeon at the Intel Developer Forum this week and - as good as its word - it didn&#39;t.
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Is parallel processing the step beyond? Here is a long-term question: is Intel starting the long walk away from the x86 architecture and towards what it sees as the "next big thing"?â¦