New products, old problems for Intel emerge

IT'S NOT OFTEN that you hear an Intel executive criticising his own company's peformance and products. But that's what Anand Chandrasekher did Tuesday in Taipei.

Products were 'long in the tooth', Intel hadn't been competitive, and there had been chipset capacity problems, he admitted - he faulted his own company's, apparently botched, attempt to refit old fabs to produce new chips.

A new, gentler, more honest Intel? Not quite. The products and strategies being verbally smacked about by Chandrasecker were the old ones from 2005. And the objective of all this candour was to present the next generation of products, and Intel's newly rehashed strategy, in the most favourable light possible.

As expected, Chandrasekher used his keynote address to formally announce the .90nm 965 chipset, previously known as Broadwater, and an ultra-low voltage notebook version of the Core 2 Duo.

And, in what was effectively a pep talk for Intel's many manufacturing partners in Taiwan, he expounded upon the many benefits of forthcoming Core 2 Duo desktop, and notebook CPUs, and new server CPUs. Given the audience, Chandrasekher's admission of problems last year can be construed as an apology for upsetting everyone's schedules by not keeping the Intel train running quite as smoothly as usual.

The emphasis was on performance and power consumption, more than price.

Unfortunately these are both areas where AMD has been giving Intel a very hard time recently. So for much of the keynote you would have been forgiven for thinking that Intel's main competitor in 2006 is... Intel in 2005 (And if only it was, I'd say they've got them comprehensively beaten).

However, Chandasekher did show some comparisons with AMD chips. These, of course, followed the industry-standard tactic of comparing unreleased next-generation products with the competitor's current generation.

But one has to at least admit, that based on these selective benchmarks, Intel may have tapped the ball back in the direction of AMD's court. That's speaking in terms of performance anyway - it would have been nice to see some power consumption and thermal comparisons with AMD up on that screen too.

 

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