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Editorial - Don’t stick a fork in AMD

With all the vigor and exactness of stock market analysts explaining a one-point shift in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, pundits are penning obits for AMD in the aftermath of Sun Microsystems’ recent decision to buy chips from Intel. Poor AMD: first Core microarchitecture, the looming doom of quad-core Core, and now the defection of its sole first-tier monogamous mate. Talk about your slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Sun did not dump AMD; AMD will continue to supply Sun Microsystems with enterprise-grade x86 server CPUs. Sun found in Intel a cheap second source of supply for x86 microprocessors. There is a place in the market for a chipmaker that can jump the buzzword bar without actually meeting the requirements of the technology that the buzzword was meant to describe. For example, to Intel, multicore means pasting multiple discrete CPUs onto a chip-shaped carrier, and a server CPU is a desktop CPU with bigger cache. There is a place in the market for a cut-rate player, and it’s not like Intel’s CPUs are junk. As I’ve said, Core is Intel’s best work to date. But Intel has to keep current x86 owners coming back for Core 2.01 and Core 2.1.

InfoWorld

Posted by | Wed, Jan 31, 2007 - 08:33 AM