Brian's Brain

....but stuck in second gear. That's how I'd characterize AMD right now. Last Monday, the same day that Intel rolled out its dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 800-series CPUs, AMD's Chairman, President and CEO Hector Ruiz strode on stage at NAB's Multimedia World Conference to deliver an up-beat keynote. AMD's CPUs have, since the Athlon unveiling in mid-1999 and until the advent of Intel's Pentium M (which at this time predominantly services only the mobile computing segment), held a notable MIPS-per-clock advantage over their Intel counterparts. AMD began talking up 64-bit computing in late 2000 and, after a length gestation period, unveiled Opteron in April of 2003 and Athlon-64 later that year; Intel's EM64T response didn't appear until a year later in conceptual form, with 64-bit Xeon CPUs (code-named Nocoma) shipping beginning in mid-2004 and 64-bit Pentium 4s (code-named Prescott) only arriving a few months ago.

AMD wasn't alone at its NAB love-fest. Jeff Katzenberg thanked AMD for its role in past DreamWorks movie productions and announced that AMD-powered workstations and servers would be the studio's preferred computing platform going forward. Rick McCallum, producer of the Star Wars prequels, was equally effusive in his praise for AMD's role in enabling rapid, robust previsualization (i.e. virtual storyboarding) for the films; McCallum even took a jab at the 'Dark Side', as he referred to 'another CPU supplier' with whom he had previously interacted, and with far less positive results. Dave Fester from Microsoft....Grammy-winning music producer Elliot Scheiner....movie director Robert Rodriguez....these and other entertainment industry luminaries appeared in real or videotaped form to espouse their appreciation of, and preference for, AMD-based products.

The good news continued later in the week when AMD rolled out its dual-core Opteron family in New York City. 4- and 8-way capable Opteron 800-series CPUs are available now, per a briefing I had with AMD yesterday at WinHEC, with the two-way 200 series appearing within 30 days. The single-CPU Opteron 100 series, along with its near-twin the Athlon64 X2, are scheduled for June availability. Intel's first dual-core CPUs conversely target the high-end gamer market; its dual-core Xeon chips for workstations and servers won't be out till next year. Intel's latest product rollout, regardless of what its recent revisionist history statements may claim, reverses a long track record of first launching features at the high end (witness both HyperThreading and EM64T) and only over time more broadly dispersing them throughout its product line. And as I've already discussed in a recent blog post, dual-core's benefits will in the near-term be far more tangibly felt in Opteron's world, where O/Ss and applications are already multi-threaded to a significant degree.

See 'Manufacturing Misfire' for the rest of the story....