Intel hands Dell gaming chip bonanza with P4EE

FOR HIGH performance desktop CPUs, it is safe to say that games sell more chips than any other application. Nothing like a rabid counterstrike fan with a trust fund to make it seem worth the extra $500 for a three per cent speed increase. There must be a lot of them out there because those chips sell a lot.

AMD has known what it had on its gaming hands with the Athlon64 FX51 for a while now. Even at IDF, or at least across the street from IDF, it knew what it had. Weeks before, it was confident to the point of smugness about the FX line. At IDF, it couldn't contain the grinning. When I told them about the P4 Emergency Edition that we scooped Intel hours before the keynote announcing it, the reply was a nonchalant "so?". The current chips have a comfortable margin over the P4EE in gaming speed and more importantly, in price.

With Prescott delayed, and Intel in panic release mode, the product gates of big cache chips is opening wide. 1MB caches will become the norm until next February when you may be able to get a Prescott. Hopefully, you will be able to get a P4EE before then. Catching up is a bitch.

So, why release this flurry of products as a stopgap measure simply to get three months or so of bragging rights? Is there a point to hobbling Prescott's image this close to launch? Yes, and quite simply, it is a four letter word, Dell.

Last spring, I was told that the AMD talks at Round Rock wanted to crack the nut through gaming. Dell is getting into the gaming PC market, and being number two in performance doesn't win you much in that rarefied atmosphere. If Dell is an Intel only shop, sales of that gaming segment go elsewhere.

Cunning plan, but how does Intel rescue the halo effect from being pulled off and danced around like a Mexican hat?

Pentium 4EE springs to mind. Watch which dealers have P4EE chips this Christmas, not those advertising or selling them, but dealers which can get quantities which need more than one hand to count them on. Let's see, there will be Dell and, umm, and….

Will it work? The reviewers and message boards seem to think so. Dell PR has just done the quarterly price dropping dance of dissing AMD in the press, and gamers are confused. Dealers are annoyed because they know the thing that everyone wants won't be on their shelves this Christmas, and they will have the pleasure of deflecting screaming kids. Oh joy.

Dell stays put, and AMD can't counter till late October or November, but that won't matter much for Christmas buyers, it takes too long to get them into systems from the big boys. Modern marketing requires a course in accurate backstabbing. µ