AMD and Intel choose September as "death to hacks" month

WHEN AMD introduces its first Barcelona chips on September 10th, a flurry of events from both it and Intel are intended to snow every journalist on practically every continent on the planet, apart from Antarctica.

You had better believe it. For example, Intel has an event in Italy which overlaps an AMD event in, er, Barcelona, making every chip journalist here in €uroland feel like Schrodinger's Cat.

The situation appears to be worse in America. There, tireless chip journalists will have to fly across America to attend more or less simultaneous events as AMD and Intel slog it out in what no doubt they believe are victimless crimes.

We hacks are the victims. No doubt you're all already sniggering.

If you're interested in benchmarketing, expect to be given a list of numbers, names and speeds and digest it in 30 seconds flat in Intel-AMD's relentless search for publicity at any cost.

It all reminds us of how Compaq and the IBM PC Company once attempted to do the same and invite the same set of journalists to two simultaneous events to their factories in places near Glasgow, Scotland.

The hacks and hackettes all protested. With the result that IBM and Compaq's PRs cooperated for the first and last time ever, so as we left one place with Compaq brollies - because it was teeming down - an IBM bus picked us all up and delivered us to its factory in Greenock without even a whimper. Big Glue was a bit cheesed off about the Big Q brollies, but hey.

We guess the AMD and Intel PRs have got their blinkers on, can only think of multicores, and so want each of us to arrive simultaneously at their respective events. They are forgetting parallism. They are forgetting threads. They are just selfishly thinking about their own product plans, forgetting the gentlewomen and gentlemen of the press. µ