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just think, 3 months ago AMD stock was under 20 easy, and now? Intel? still struggling at 20. How art the mighty fallen.
Intel is having its problems but is far from desperate. They were the unrivaled king for so long that they forgot what can happen with a true competitor and with the anti-trust suit going they have to make sure they stay totally within the law in competing with AMD or risk a major slapdown. Their production facilities are enough to produce any possible demand for chips, AMD can't say the same. Among their problems is they continually underestimated the Athlon from the beginning. Then they repeated that "crime" with the Athlon 64 / Opteron. Add to that they over estimated the potential gigahertz ceiling (10 ghz compared to the ~3.9 that they reached). This left them with the current situation where they can't keep scaling the gigahertz and have to try to compete by adding cores to CPUs that were designed for single core.
Most of the time since the introduction of the original Athlon AMD has held the performance crown and with the introduction of the Athlon 64 they took the technology lead. By starting the anti-trust case they opened up access to the laptop market and the server market both of which are
very lucrative. Right now AMD is making hay and building the quality reputation at the high end which will help them once Intel gets over their current technological doldrums. AMDs only problem right now is that they have an opening and don't have enough production ability to take full use of it. In a way they are lucky that Intel wasn't content to let AMD hold the speed crown. If they were then AMD would have been unlikely to have pushed the envelope as far as they had and Intel would not have over reached themselves and gambled that AMD was bluffing about the Athlon 64 / Opteron being designed as multi core (no bluff, it was). This leaves AMD with the tech lead, performance lead, cooler running chips and the ability to scale to 4 core and possibly higher much more easily than Intel.
The last 3 rounds were: Athlon vs Pentium II / II - Athlon by a judges decision.
Athlon XP vs Pentium IV - 15 rounds and Athlon won on points with the Pentium IV gaining ground in the late rounds.
Athlon 64 / Opteron vs Pentium IV / Xeon - Athlon 64 / Opteron by a knockout.
The question is what new contender can Intel bring out? They have the resources to work on multiple designs concurrently (AMD does not) which allows them to design a whole stable of chips and take the cream of the crop to push ahead with. They could quite well come out with a chip that blows away the Athlon 64 / Opteron. I doubt that they will as they will likely rush it to completion and hope for a draw in round 4 while preparing for a knockout in round 5. The big question is will they underestimate the
next AMD chip and will AMD stumble as they did repeatedly in the K5/K6 days where Intel beat them soundly?
For now AMD pays off debts and build reputation (and manufacturing ability) in markets they desperately need while Intel is working to maintain mindshare and prepare for the next round. Hopefully both will thrive and a
3rd competitor will emerge. I prefer a healthy market with multiple companies competing on a level playing field with no one dominant enough to push around the clientele (namely me of course).
Topic: Intel is desperate (Read 2418 times)