Abdul Bijur V

Intel has already released their santa rosa platform with centrino 2.0. They already have the 45nm “Quad Core” processor which is infact a patched up two core 2 duo’s packaged into a single cpu. The advantage they have is that laptops/Desktops are already out with this configuration and the marketing team of intel (which i believe is their best men on the deck) are doing a great job heralding it as the next best thing. So much so that an ardent fan of amd like myself have got one of these babies (more cos lenovo doesnt have an amd port).

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) on the other hand had an awful delay in their quad core processors. Why? Because they wanted to come out with a real quad core processors with 4 cores in a single die and they are planning to release two packaged quad cores (like the quad core intel) into a single cpu and release a single 8 core cpu. In the meanwhile, they also acquired ATI and now have a fantastic chipset technology.

They also up-ed their hypertransport to version 3.0 which supports bus speeds of upto 3600 Mhz compared to the fsb of 800 Mhz of Intel’s santa rosa. Their new Cool n Quiet 2.0 has given individual cores the ability to shut each other out and have considerable savings on power.

ATI tie up is bearing fruits in the form of the new platform, Spider. Spider is a platform which can accommodate upto 4 graphics cards in a crossfire X formation providing upto 3 times the performance achieved from a single card.

And all this AMD intends to unleash to medium segment market at a very affordable price. If these plans go well, Intel could well be in for a tough time. Intel processors have always be expensive and the integrated graphics always of bad quality. With ATI AMD can have good quality graphics cards and motherboard and the processor made by a single company which would make sure that the compatibilities and stability of the system is high while keeping costs down.

The market strategy of AMD seems good, but can that form a dent in the extremely strong marketing strategies of Intel, that is yet to be seen. AMD sure does seem to be hitting all the right buttons by pointing their stress towards the medium and lower medium markets. The entire platform + graphics + Processor(quad core) range is being touted to be highly affordable.

The gaming community already have AMD as their favourite, but the lack of any significant product releases by AMD in the last 1 year has significantly hurt AMD’s image and has led Intel to significantly raise the prices of their processors.

Bear in mind that AMD already has a significantly larger market share in the servers segment than Intel and even now Intel server segment processors of Xeon are finding life difficult competing with Opteron.

AMD finally seems to have settled down after the whole merger and now have started getting their act right. The next few months would show us, how effective their new brainchild is.