MICROPROCESSOR:  Up, up and away...

After making inroads into the performance and value segment of the global

home PC market through its Duron and Athlon lines of processors, it is now the

turn of the notebooks, servers and workstations. And Advanced Micro Devices

(AMD) is leaving no stone unturned. The company first announced two new Athlon

chips and a chipset as Intel Corp’s main rival in microprocessors seeking to

gain a foothold in the lucrative computer-server market. Next, it has introduced

the 1.4-GHz Athlon processor for the performance market and the 950-MHz Duron

processor for everyday business and home computing.

With the introduction of the Athlon two years ago, AMD, for the first time,

had a processor that matched Intel toe-to-toe on performance. And the results

were spectacular–processor and other core sales rose by over 30% and revenue,

income and processor marketshare grew significantly. Not even the softness in

the PC sales market seemed to bother AMD, with the company posting annual sales

for 2000 that were 63% higher than in 1999.

What’s more, between the processors sold early in 2000 based on the K7

core, and those sold in the second half of the year based on the Thunderbird

core, Athlon has achieved a 24% unit share, bringing AMD’s total global

desktop share to 17%.

According to experts, the Athlon MP processors running at speeds of 1 Ghz and

1.2 Ghz, coupled with the AMD-760 MP chipset, give AMD an advantage against its

larger rival Intel because on certain performance benchmarks, AMD’s new chips

better Intel’s current offerings and are less expensive. The two processors,

for now, are designed for the entry-level server market, which contain one or

two chips per server and typically cost $6,000 or less.

The Athlon MP chip also boasts some 52 new instructions that help boost

floating-point performance, which is one measure of gauging ability to crunch

data. Better floating-point performance means faster delivery of multimedia

files and decreases the time required to render complex designs of rockets,

aerodynamic performance and other number-intensive applications, for example.

Naturally, experts believe that this is the first and fundamental step that the

company has taken into the server market.

The company has also been concentrating on performance segment through its

policy of introducing better products and is positioning its 1.4-GHz Athlon

processor as the world’s most powerful PC processor in this market. Says Pat

Moorhead, vice-president, desktop and mobile marketing, AMD, "At 1.4GHz,

the AMD Athlon processor with DDR memory continues to significantly outperform

the competition as the most powerful PC platform in the world, reinforcing AMD’s

leadership in performance."

However, AMD’s performance lead may be short-lived if we take into account

the May 21 announcement of Intel. The company has announced that its new Xeon

chips, using the Pentium 4 core and running at 1.7 Ghz, will be available by the

end of Q2. Intel isn’t ill prepared; with the upcoming Prestonia (Xeon MP)

chip supposedly shipping with Jackson technology enabled for the first time, it

should be able to give AMD a run for their money, especially the larger cache

versions. However, that is still over half-a-year away, and AMD has a time on

its side.

SHUBHENDU PARTH in New Delhi