AMD says Intel pride came before 64-32 fall

JUST A FEW blocks away from Moscone West, where Intel is hosting its Developer Forum, AMD is having its own much smaller event.

Over at the Westin in Union Square, we met some AMD executives who had their own point of view about Intel's earlier announcement of 64-32 bit extensions.

They said that the adoption of these extensions rivaled the EISA-MCA debacle of the late 1980s and described it as the biggest about face ever.

"Intel underestimated us and their arrogance didn't allow them to take hold of what they were doing," said Benjamin J. Williams, director of AMD's server and workstation business unit.

But they also attempted to say with a straight face that it wasn't about beating Intel. More a kind of a validation of its approach.

And they also said that AMD's architecture is a leap ahead of Intel's, mostly because of hypertransport and the huge bottleneck of Intel's current front side bus.

And they also said that the Itanic and the RISC chips were welcome to fight it out in the big tin arena, where their own technology for $50,000 systems wasn't competing anyway.

They claimed that AMD had executed on its strategy and the announcement it made earlier today of 30 watt Opterons meant they could target the four way market, where Intel wasn't able to compete.

The only reservations we have are that Intel has massive amounts of money and marketing clout, and surely it will get over the bumps in the roadmap it's experiencing right now, sooner or later.

It might have to tear up the roadmaps and do something clever with the Pentium M. But in any case the addition of Intel to the 64-32 camp means that the support for this platform on software and on hardware means that AMD has a chance here, but also finds itself once more in a head-to-head with Intel.

Intel, meanwhile, will quietly forget it ever said the world didn't need 64-32 bit technology, and what is indeed a huge u-turn will be removed from the history books.

This is going to make the chip wars more interesting, although chatting to the other hacks here, quite a few expressed slight sadness that they couldn't endlessly speculate about the Yamhill yet again.

What is likely to happen is that AMD will gain a lot more credibility in the corporate marketplace, and if it can deliver better price performance than Intel, may well gain more wins of the sort that will make it more money.

Meanwhile, AMD kicked off its marketing push with ads in the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. Essentially, this ad in the Journal says the ranks are growing - and has a huge list of software and hardware partners. Can't see Dell in there though.

And in other news, AMD had two coffee stands at street corners between the W and Argent hotels, where they were doling out free water, coffee and t-shirts. The rumour is that Kicking Pat Gelsinger stopped by to pick up the marketing collateral.

One of our readers, Brian Richardson, has kindly sent us a picture of one.