Jerry "soundbite" Sanders on the Athlon 64

MAYBE IT'S HAVING been there that does it. There are some speakers who are simply worth listening to when they hold forth about their company. The true master is Steve Jobs who can turn just about any presentation into something that leaves you thinking the world is about to change for the better. Jerry Sanders, founder of AMD, doesn't manage to achieve Jobs' sheer charisma but he has a different kind of magnetism. When Jerry speaks, you know it's coming from a man who built a small company into something that makes Intel nervous.

Some people seemed surprised that Jerry was at the Cannes launch but it was the natural place for him to be. Let's face it, San Francisco and Taiwan just don't have the same glamour as Cannes.

There was something about the way that Jerry delivered his part of the launch that made it seem like he was relieved that it was finally happening. What was originally called the x86-64 architecture, now AMD64, was Jerry's dream. It was meant to be AMD's way of taking the initiative away from Intel. Sure, we had a couple of years where the original Athlon was clocking higher than competing Pentium IIIs but its design was dictated by following Intel's lead; it was just faster. Moving to 64bit is something else entirely. AMD has the driving seat, so when Jerry called this the "Age of Innovation," it carried some nice extra bite.

Innovation was a key theme for Jerry. Not only was this the "Age of Innovation," he expounded on the "virtuous cycle of innovation" and proclaimed that the IT industry was "hungry for innovation." It seemed like a direct slap in the face for Intel, as though he was chastising the firm for sitting on its x86 laurels for too long and not doing much more than working at getting higher clock speeds.

He was determined that the Athlon 64 was "the Next Big Thing." He may well be right. According to Jerry, there is a "pervasive need for 64bit" in almost every area of the chip market. There were plenty of people at the launch of the Athlon 64 to support that statement, not that it takes too much guess work to figure out that the days of 32bit computing are numbered.

One of the more interesting things that Jerry spoke of was a small snippet of roadmappery that points exactly where AMD is intending to head. In the Q&A that followed the presentation, Jerry let slip that "AMD will sell more 64bit processors than 32bit processors by the second half of next year." That's quite some ramp upwards. He also said that the firm had designed both the Athlon 64 and the Opteron so that multiple cores on a single chip was easy to achieve, something that was explained in some detail during the technical symposium that followed the main launch presentation.

The INQUIRER's very own Mike Magee was Jerry's only journalist worthy of mention. Mike had taken particular note of one of Sanders' soundbites at the Opteron launch, that the Opteron would outsell the Itanium's sales of four years within its first four months of shipping. According to Jerry, who somewhat nervously asked during the Q&A if Mike was present, Opteron sales are more than half way to that goal. He missed out that the four months are pretty much over but it must still be a frightener for Intel execs.

Perhaps the best indication of Jerry's thoughts on the state of the industry and AMD's future was something he said at the end of his presentation, "AMD64 is the only platform that takes us forward." It will be interesting to see if that soundbite turns out to be true. µ