AMD not feeling heat of Intel breakthrough
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InfoWorld - Advanced Micro Devices is undaunted by rival Intel&#8217;s recent headline-grabbing announcements of 45-nm (nanometer) processing technology and a deal to supply Xeon chips to Sun Microsystems.
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Advanced Micro Devices will demonstrate dual-core chips Tuesday, but Intel will likely do the same in a week.
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What will the future hold for AMD?
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Dual-core chips that AMD and Intel plan to bring to market next year won't be sharing their memories.
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Intel missed its earnings projection, but its inventories dropped. Or did they? Bill Mann thinks not.
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Paperwork delays slow AMD Intel and AMD have embraced a divide and propaganda approach to tout their upcoming server chips.â¦
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With Christmas just 11 days away, you have to wonder what Hector Ruiz is going to find under his tree. It&#8217;s been a terrible year for Advanced Micro Devices, and the chipmaker&#8217;s analysts conference on Thursday did nothing to spread holiday cheer.Confirming what many in the chip world had suspected for some time, CEO Ruiz and other AMD execs fessed up that bugs in its new quad-core Barcelona server and Phenom desktop chips will&#160;delay these key next-generation technologies.The technical problems will delay general availability of the fastest version of the chips for three or four months. Customers willing to settle for slower clock speeds will be able to get the processors sooner; for example, AMD will ship a 2 gigahertz version of the Barcelona first, instead of the expected 2.5 gigahertz speed. In either case, the chips will be close to a year late; the original target date was the first quarter of 2007.AMD STUMBLES AS INTEL SPEEDS AHEADThe problem couldn&#8217;t come at a worse time. AMD has struggled all year to close the performance gap between its high-end chips and Intel&#8217;s. Barcelona, the company had promised, would restore its technical supremacy. Indeed some analysts said they had expected the quad-core server chip to do just that. &#8220;At 2.5 gigahertz it would have beaten any Intel products,&#8221; said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. &#8220;But at 2 gigahertz, it&#8217;s bringing up the rear,&#8221; he said.Intel, meanwhile, has corrected many of the problems that dogged it earlier in the decade. &#8220;AMD isn&#8217;t competing against the Intel of two years ago,&#8221; said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel has had quad-core chips in the market for about a year. To be fair, its chips are based on a somewhat simpler design; Intel gets to four cores by packaging two dual-core chips together. By contrast, AMD&#8217;s design integrates four cores on one chip, a more efficient solution, said McCarron. Except that AMD&#8217;s approach reduces yields and thus raises manufacturing costs, he added.There was earlier speculation that Barcelona&#8217;s problems were related to the ATI graphics chipset, but the problem turns out to be deeper, at the chip level. AMD has said it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor&#39;s L3 cache.DOUBTS ABOUT A QUICK FIXIn the Thursday conference, analysts had expected discussion of the company&#8217;s &#8220;asset light strategy,&#8221; which will apparently entail outsourcing more manufacturing to foundries such as Chartered Semiconductor or TSMC. But they didn&#8217;t get it, and the lack of details made CEO Ruiz&#8217;s promise to return to profitability in 2008 less credible to Wall Street. AMD&#8217;s financial performance has been terrible, losing money for four straight quarters. Part of the reason: Intel and AMD have engaged in a bloody price war, a struggle that has been very tough on the smaller company&#8217;s profit margins. But the Barcelona and Phenom delays are serious self-inflicted wounds.AMD&#8217;s stock lost another few points yesterday and has now shed about 40% in the last two months and a bone-jarring 56% since the beginning of the year. At $8.84 a share, Thursday&#8217;s closing price, the stock is at its lowest ebb since the summer of 2003. Ironically, AMD has so far&#160;rewarded Ruiz with pay raises.
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Intel has confirmed it will not release a 4GHz version of its flagship Pentium 4 product. Instead it will transfer its engineers to the company&#39;s new design priorities.
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As Intel pursues a new path with improved multi-core chips, AMD says itâs already one step ahead. Intel told the world this week that there is no race to market the next generation of microchips.
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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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With a few strong years of market gains and product reviews, AMD isn't about to rest on its laurels.
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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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To judge by the shift in the headlines, the processor war is nearly over. Who&#39;s in? Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD). Out? Intel (Nasdaq: INTC).
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Well, just about For the last six months, AMD's market share has been on the wane as arch-rival Intel regained much of the lead it lost to the smaller chip maker during 2006. But new figures show AMD's slide may have come to a halt.â¦
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With stronger profits to report, Intel's looking forward to this week. Struggling AMD, on the other hand, will hope it goes by quickly.
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The quad-core server chip won't appear until later this year, but AMD's trying to show potential customers the chips are up and running.
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In our lab tests, Intel's 45nm Penryn CPU didn't blow away the previous generation, but the tech behind it should keep Intel ahead.