Coppermine braces itself, without Rambus

1999-10-25

Yesterday’s announcement by Intel concerning the copper-based version of its Pentium III chip has one major objective: to knock AMD off its perch. AMD’s flagship product, the Athlon processor, currently claims the high ground as the fastest PC processor. The importance of this position is as much to do with marketing as anything, however so is the whole of the IT business.

The popular press, at least in the UK, has warmly received the Athlon, as have the vendors IBM, Dell and Gateway. These factors led to AMD’s better-than-expected financial importance reported a fortnight ago. Intel has already swept away a number of chip companies, such as National Semiconductor, who have found it difficult to fund the levels of research and development necessary to keep up. Not so AMD who have proved themselves capable of beating Intel at their own game.

Both Intel and AMD’s processor marketing is geared around “being the best”, and neither is likely to let the other get away with being top dog for long. AMD announced the opening of a new fabrication plant, in Dresden, last week which will be capable of manufacturing the next generation Athlon chips – pre-production versions have been running at 900MHz. The two companies are likely to leapfrog each other to the 1Ghz holy grail, and the first to achieve this at a production scale is likely to gain huge kudos as a result.

Intel’s announcement should be seen in context – it is playing the game for which it invented the rules. The only downside for technologists is the absence of Rambus support from the launch. As we reported in August \link{http://www.it-director.com/99-08-06-2.html,(see article)}, Rambus has some advantages particularly for the Server. While this is a blow for some PC makers who were planning to ship the new processor and chipset together (and who will now have to wait), it remains to be seen whether this will affect the market as a whole.

(First published 25 October 1999)