Fusion of AMD and ATI complete?

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Saturday, 28 October 2006

Page 1 of 3 ! Despite leading the race against Intel with the Opteron and the Athlon 64 over the past couple of years, AMD needed a partner with vast chip manufacturing experience of its own to strike back at Intel’s recent resurgence. What does the future hold for the newly merged company? The rise of the Opteron processor from AMD was the start of a recent golden era for AMD. Coupled with the success of the 64-bit extensions to an x86 processor, and AMD’s later march toward dual core processors that properly integrated two cores onto a single die. AMD claimed that Intel’s initial dual-core chip, the Pentium D, was just a kludge, jamming two chips together, instead of a true dual-core solution. The market agreed, and AMD held the crown for technological superiority, even though Intel was far more profitable and remains so to this day. What ‘saved’ Intel during this period was the incredible success of the Centrino platform for notebook and portable computers, the incredible momentum of sales from the decade old Pentium brand name and Intel’s preferred supplier status among most of the computer companies they supplied, including, of course, the then Intel-only shop that was Dell. Oh, and all those profits still coming through the door. But Intel knew that it couldn’t survive on past glories or wringing out further performance from existing product lines. After a false start with Intel’s Indian R&D labs failing to produce a next-generation processor, it was up to Intel’s Israel R&D labs to come to the rescue. This was done by re-engineering the Pentium M, born of the Pentium III and crafting it into the Core Duo, and then various versions of the Core 2 Duo for desktop, mobile and ultramobile uses. While it took Intel some time to get going... there’s no question the Core 2 Duo range is a stunning success that has placed AMD on the back foot. AMD was clearly watching this activity closely, wondering when Intel would get its act together, and calculating when its own processor dominance would end. Now the roles are reversed – Intel is once again dominant, with AMD-beating processors, and an upcoming Core 2 Quad processor that joins two dual-core processors together to create a quad core chip, of sorts. AMD claims that this isn’t a true quad-core processor, but simply two dual-core processors stuck together. While this is true, it enables Intel to deliver a quad core processor in mid November – in a scant two or so weeks time, while AMD’s own ‘true’ quad-core processor is not due to arrive in the market place until the second half of 2007. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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