AMD moves to 65nm desktops in race against Intel

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 06 December 2006 03:22

Your IT - Home IT

While Intel is already working on moving to making chips with a 45nm process by next year, AMD has just brought its first 65nm desktop processors to market. Intel is still smarting from the beating received at the hands of its smaller Silicon Valley neighbour in the past two years. However, the pressure is back on AMD after Intel released an impressive range of 65nm processors in the second half of 2006.

Intel, which has about a six month lead on AMD in the chip shrinkage stakes, moved from 90nm to 65nm design earlier this year and has had phenomenal success with its new Core 2 Duo dual-core processor range, which have sold by the million. The Santa Clara-based chip maker also released its quad-core Core 2 Extreme last month, turning up the heat on AMD even further.

AMD, which now has more than 20% market share of the computing processor market, has vowed to increase that to 30% by the end of 2008. The move to 65nm starting with the Athlon X2 dual-core processor is the beginning of the fight back against Intel's latest aggressive moves. The fast tracking of its Barcelona quad-core processor, which has four cores on a single die and is due to be on the market in the second quarter of 2007, continues the chip race.

A problem for AMD is that the much larger Intel spends about five times the funds on its design and manufacturing and has promised to bring 45nm processors to market in 2007, with a firm time line for even smaller chips in succeeding years. AMD is also working on 45nm chips but as yet has not committed to a release date, indicating that it is having difficulty keeping pace with Intel's better resourced development program.

As the competition heats up between the two chip makers, the big winners are consumers, who have recently seen a spate of new super fast processors hit the market with relatively low power consumption, while previous generation processors have dropped in price dramatically.