Mad Dog Sanders -
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Trash talking
No AMD conference would be complete without some Intel trash talk and Sanders happily obliged. The cross-freeway rival is in trouble, he claimed, because of the problems inherent in the designs of the Pentium 4 and Itanium, the 64-bit server chip. The Pentium 4 is expensive to make and under-performs Athlon, he said.
"I think Intel is trapped. When they designed the Pentium 4, they didn't expect to have a real competitor in the marketplace with a meaningful alternative," Sanders said. "They always underestimate us and being underestimated is a good thing."
Itanium, meanwhile, will suffer because of the difficulty of producing software applications for the chip. Itanium uses a different architecture than other Intel chips. Hammer, meanwhile, is compatible with existing 32-bit applications.
"My biggest fear is that Intel will come out with a 32-bit processor with 64-bit extensions because it is the right thing to do," he said. "The Itanium it turns out is a niche product...We are going to have a role in the industry because we better fulfill Microsoft's needs."
Life won't be easy next year, Sanders and other executives noted. AMD likely won't return to profitability until the second quarter. Flash memory prices will also continue to decline because of overcapacity in the industry. Flash revenues may not tick up at AMD until the third quarter.
The effort to get into servers will also eventually require endorsement from a major manufacturer, Sanders added.
"At the end of the day, we need to get a Compaq, Dell or HP, he said. "IBM is going to be tough." |
