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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: willcousa who wrote (142530)	8/30/2001 5:23:51 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Borrowed from survivin on the AMD thread: AMD pulls out of Intel speed race Decent story outlining the new marketing focus. Even throws in a couple of quips from kumar. By Dan Neel and Jack McCarthy August 30, 2001 9:21 am PT infoworld.com ADVANCED MICROS DEVICES has ended its race with rival Intel for the title of fastest PC processor, claiming "consumers who rely on megahertz as an indication of relative performance are victims of missed expectations." AMD officials this week revealed that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker will spearhead an industrywide initiative beginning in October to develop a new measure of compute performance that "end-users can trust." The new metric will not be based on the individual clock speed of the processor, but on overall system performance, according to Linda Kohout, a brand manager for AMD's Duron processor. After carving out a 21 percent share of the PC processor market by publicly racing Intel to the 1GHz PC processor speed mark and beyond, AMD will now begin to downplay chip speeds with the introduction of four new Athlon XP processors set to ship next month. The four Athlon XP processors will sport model numbers representing their relative performance when factoring in overall system performance. For example, the new Athlon XP 1500+ chip will equal a 1.33GHz processor. The 1600+ will equate to a 1.4GHz chip, the 1700+ will correspond to a 1.47GHz chip, and the 1800+ will equal a 1.53GHz processor, according to AMD. In changing its processor-branding strategy, AMD has stumbled upon a way of thinking that those in the high-performance server arena have known for some time. "The only measure of performance that really matters is the amount of time it takes to execute a given application," Kohout said. With this in mind, Kohout said that most of the world's most powerful servers and workstations have low frequency, sub-1GHz processors. Even Intel's own top-of-the-line Itanium chips only reach speeds of around 800MHz, because the balance of I/O, memory, and cache deliver the performance in high-end servers, not just a hyper-fast processor, Kohout said. Going forward, AMD and its PC manufacturing partners will design systems in that very same way, she said. Kohout explained that Intel missed the point when it designed its Intel Pentium 4 chip, which for the first time departed from Intel's own x86 processor architecture to a new architecture Intel named Epic. According to Kohout, Intel's Pentium 4 chips may be hitting the 2GHz mark internally, but overall system performance is actually dropping. "With the Pentium 4, the amount of work went down for the first time, as much as 20 percent," she said. "Even though the P4 [megahertz] goes up, work for clock cycle actually goes down." AMD believes its channel partners are in step with the company's new approach to labeling PC performance and will support the new Athlon XP chips and include them in their products. "We believe we will have OEMs from multiple OEM channels," Kohout said. "We have broad chip-set and motherboard support." Chip-set support will come from companies such as Acer, Nvidia, and Via, she said. Kohout also said AMD will take the same approach with its Athlon MP (multiprocessor) chips. "In Q4, we will push performance higher with the Athlon MP, including processors for servers and workstations," she said. Although AMD is a diverse chip maker, with 32 percent of its revenue coming from flash memory and other solid-state chips, the company's PC processor business -- of which it owns a 21 percent market share -- has suffered recently beneath fierce competition from Intel, according to Ashok Kumar, an industry analyst for U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, based in Menlo Park, Calif. "Besides pricing pressure from Intel, AMD's processor business is shifting rapidly to value PCs," Kumar said. "Also, AMD has yet to find traction in the corporate market. Compaq's decision to fold its 64-bit roadmap into Intel's Itanium family limits the potential of AMD's nascent efforts in the server arena. We also believe that in the future Compaq will more closely align with Intel on the desktop and notebooks as well." Compaq is currently a 10 percent revenue customer for AMD, Kumar said. Dan Neel is an InfoWorld senior writer. Jack McCarthy is an InfoWorld associate news editor.