AMD Ready to Challenge Intel Corp in New Chip Battles
With Advanced Micro Devices Inc. pushing out a slew of new products this month, its long-chilled chip war with Intel Corp. may just be heating up again, analysts say.
After struggling with delayed products and bad market and mind-share woes through 2007, a lot of industry pundits started writing off AMD. And while AMD struggled, Intel held strong over the past year and a half, coming out with quad-core chips and a 45-nanometer processor family and staying well ahead of AMD’s road map.
Recently, though, AMD has begun showing some signs of life, pushing out a graphics chip set early this month and a slew of new desktop processors this week. With the first AMD Barcelona-based systems expected to hit in April, and a 65-watt quad-core desktop chip and a triple-core desktop chip now in the mix, AMD may be starting to kick back into gear.
And that kind of renewed competition between the two processor giants can only be good for the industry, said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz.
“It’s good to see AMD back in the game,” he said. “They’ve still got a lot of issues to handle, especially financially. I don’t know if I’d say they’re in fighting shape. Once you dig a hole, it’s hard to dig out of it. But they’re definitely back in the game.”
But as AMD picks up the pace, Intel isn’t giving it a steady target.
