Published: April 21, 2005
John Markoff contributed reporting for this article.
Advanced Micro Devices is hoping to one-up Intel, the Goliath of the chip industry, with a new line of microprocessors based on the latest technology - even if David is entering the battlefield a few days behind.
The chips are based on an architecture known as dual core. For decades, chip makers have steadily improved the traditional benchmark for performance, known as clock speed. But the idea behind dual-core technology is to break up processing tasks between engines on a single piece of silicon to process functions faster and more efficiently.
The chips can accomplish comparable performance even when running at a lower speed (and lower temperatures) than a single-core chip, while consuming less power.
Intel officially introduced chips based on the new design on Monday, while A.M.D.'s announcement is scheduled today.
From the outset, the two companies have taken different approaches to dual-core products. A.M.D.'s first chips will be for corporate servers. Products using those chips, like a new ProLiant server from Hewlett-Packard, will typically cost $7,000 or more. The approach gives server customers immediate performance gains, the company said, and the dual-core chip can be easily swapped into existing machines.
Intel's first dual-core chip, on the other hand, is for use in high-end desktop machines, typically the kind used by game enthusiasts and graphic designers. The first were announced this week by Dell along with Alienware and Velocity Micro. Intel promises a more mainstream version in the near future.
A.M.D. will announce today that it will have a dual-core chip for desktop computers as well, based on its Athlon 64 product, in June. Samples are already being delivered to computer makers, the company said.
And despite being upstaged by Intel in the timing of their announcements, A.M.D. is claiming a technical victory, since its design integrates two separate processing units in a single chip, communicating more efficiently than Intel's, which is based on two separate chips wired together and placed in a single package.
"In terms of solution elegance, they're scrambling," Marty Seyer, general manager of A.M.D.'s microprocessor business unit, said of Intel in an interview.
But Intel denies any technical superiority to A.M.D.'s approach, and predicts millions of customers will take advantage of the features before the year is out. "We have a great dual-core product," said Robert Manetta, an Intel spokesman. "The numbers will speak for themselves."
Nathan Brookwood, president of Insight64, a market research company, affirmed A.M.D.'s technical achievement but not necessarily its advantage.
"There's little doubt that if both companies turned their chips in as part of a C.P.U. design course at M.I.T., A.M.D. would get the higher grade for the elegance of its design," he said, referring to a computer's central processing unit. "But it remains to be demonstrated whether A.M.D. can translate that elegance into a performance advantage, and whether they can translate any performance advantage into sales."
Furthermore, Intel is committed to investing heavily in dual-core technology, analysts say. As proof, Andy Bryant, its chief financial officer, told investors this week that Intel was accelerating its capital spending, largely to pour resources into dual-chip development.
But for Intel in particular, whose very name is associated with the steady progress in chip speed, the marketing challenge will be to communicate a new message to customers, who have grown accustomed to thinking of raw speed as the critical factor. Now the company needs to convince them that processing efficiency is the key.
The competition between the two chip makers has intensified of late. A.M.D., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., laid claim to being the first to deliver a true 64-bit microprocessor for servers, the Opteron. And Intel made a series of missteps last year that led it to cancel key projects, reorganize the company and change its development strategy.
Yet the real blow came when Intel engineers disclosed last May that the company had hit a technical wall in chip development and that simply building faster chips was causing severe heat problems. Instead, Intel said it would shift to dual-core development, a strategy that A.M.D. had adopted long before.
Intel and A.M.D. both insist that they set the dates of their announcements long ago, independent of each other.
But Mr. Seyer of A.M.D. called Intel's announcements this week "hurried, reactionary moves" aimed at laying claim to being first. "This is our year," Mr. Seyer insisted. "We're going to own the dual-core space."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/21/techn ... 1chip.html
