Intel looks to Woodcrest to halt AMD march

Stan Beer
Monday, 26 June 2006 21:40

IT Industry - Strategy

AMD has been stealing Intel's thunder for the past two years, increasing its processor market share from the mid-teens to over 20% and openly claiming that it will capture a 30% share by 2008. Intel hopes to avert that disastrous secenario with its Woodcrest server chip.

Woodcrest, based on the Intel Core platform, is aimed at stopping AMD's particularly spectacular rise in the server space, where in North America the Intel rival has captured close to 50% of the market. According to Intel, Woodcrest will provide significant performance improvements and power consumption reduction over its AMD Opteron rival.

{mosgoogle left} However, AMD has beaten Intel to the punch in recent times, coming out with both the first dual core processors and a 64-bit platform. This has helped the Intel rival get its foot in the door at places that were once exclusive Intel shops, prompting some analysts to postulate that Intel has lost its sole supplier status in much of the vendor community forever.

Last month Dell Computer announced its first ever non-Intel deal with AMD and the company says it already has the capacity to meet 30% market demand. With its first 65 nm fab plant coming on line before the end of the year, AMD expects to boost production capacity even further.