Intel faces tough fight to regain market share

INDUSTRY DOYEN Nathan Brookwood thinks Intel faces an uphill fight to regain market share lost to AMD. Mercury Research estimated that Intel's overall share of the X86 market dropped to 78 per cent, last week.

Brookwood, in a note to his clients, said that while Intel's next gen Woodcrests and Cointreaux "leave AMD's Athlon 64 X2 and FX products in the dust on most benchmarks," it will take Chipzilla quite some time to ramp its CPUs fast enough.

He does think, however, that Intel should have few problems ramping Woodcrest to a substantial portion of its overall shipments in Q3 and Q4. But the IBM Opteron deal yesterday expands AMD's share, and it's still not clear how seriously Dell will introduce its Opterons.

He said that Intel CEO Paul Otellini estimated it will take his firm seven weeks to ship its first million Core 2 processors. But, adds Brookwood, Intel needs ship at least 21 million Netbust chips in Q3 and 25 million in Q4 to maintain its unit share.

He said: "We just don't see how Intel can ramp production of this [Core 2] chip fast enough to make a difference this calendar year."

But, said Brookwood, AMD's shift to DDR-2 and to 65 nanometres won't reverse the Intel performance advantages.

It may attract the attention of serious gamers and enthusiasts with its 4X4 offering. µ

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