Everyone knows the jingle, the happy little tones of Intel. We all giggled when we spied the little “Intel Inside” sticker on the outside of that first Pentium CPU-it was like a whisper through our cochlea that said, “this is gonna be so much better than that 486, hallelujah, praise be to God.”
Ah the memoriesthe ten-year-oldmemories.
But it had to happen someday that a sapling, a kid from the Bronx, some daggum whippersnapper of a company would threaten the reign of the king. The main event is just around the corner, as AMDI’m sorry, who? Ahem, Advanced Micro Devices is gaining ground on the champ.
The first sign of an aging and out of shape champion was this week’s race to market dual-core server processors. Intel had planned on releasing its dual-core in May. But once word came that AMD’s would be launched on April 21, a dazed Intel made a sprint for the first-on-the-market finish line. Unfortunately for Intel, tugging on its shorts on April 18, gasping and wheezing at it looked at the reports, AMD’s dual-core was better! Twenty percent better because the cores are integrated allowing for more direct communication.
Ouch.
But wait, it gets worse.
“More than 40 percent of the top-100 global companies or their affiliates as ranked by the Forbes Global 2000 are now customers of AMD-processor-based systems,” said Pat Patla, server/workstation marketing manager at AMD. “Customers running AMD systems include Deutsche Bank, ConocoPhillips, ChevronTexaco, Yahoo!, SingTel, Renault, and British Telecom.”
And then, the punch that brings Intel down for the count: fair weather Johnsons. Folks are jumping ship. What used to be a hole-in-the-pocket alternative (AMD, that is), is now charming the pants off loyal manufacturers because Intel can’t keep up supplies-specifically to Asia.
According to SinoCast, a Chinese website, and EE Times, China’s Tsinghua Unisplendour Corp. Ltd. has moved to develop notebook PCs based on microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) due to a shortage of competitive chips from rival Intel Corp.
It turns out that Unisplendour has been using AMD chips since November, and the shortage from Intel could continue for another month.
Perhaps Intel has some aces stashed away, a deathblow, or a crabby old Burgess Meredith in the closet, but we’re all waiting to see if the champ can survive.
