Chipping away

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) have been rivals in the chip-making world ever since they were born and are expected to continue being so as they both near four decades of existence. In India, while the AMD-SemIndia consortium made headlines, Intel announced a $1 billion investment to score a brownie point, and it has managed to stay in the limelight with its periodic announcements of World Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax) pilots and mobile computing forays. On the basis of turnover, the battle is more the David and Goliath kind ""Intel being a $35 billion behemoth while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is a $5.6 billion firm. But the real fight is over who will be the first to introduce processors or chips that can boot the computer faster and with lower energy consumption. The faster it gets, the more applications it can perform simultaneously (i.e. multi-tasking).

A typical user today would like to keep a word document open, and may be an excel sheet too for reference, while simultaneously checking e-mail and searching the Net for some information. If processors are not powerful enough to handle these tasks simultaneously, computing becomes a dragged-out chore. Fast processors are crucial for gaming too, as computer games get more realistic with each passing day. AMD scored in the gaming space by acquiring ATI Technologies, which is a bitter competitor of Nvidia in the gaming chip (known as graphics process//g unit or GPU) space. Not to be left behind, Intel launched its Intel Core2 Extreme desktop processor, which is being taken very seriously in the gaming world. Talk of integrating the CPU and GPU on a single chipset is already on.

Now Intel has launched the latest version of its Centrino mobile computing platform, code-named Santa Rosa, which promises faster speeds and also power saving. The company has also released the first four-core (quad-core) processors by combining two dual-core ones (basically two processors, in most cases, residing side-by-side on the same die). Not to be outdone, AMD has unveiled the upcoming Phenom processor family name and publicly demonstrated the first all-MD eight-core platform, codenamed "FASN8" (pronounced fascinate). Will these moves help AMD snatch market share from Intel? A recent Mercury Research report states that Intel grew its market share (over AMD) in the first quarter to 81 per cent from 74 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2006. Moreover, AMD's fourth-quarter results were poor and it is said to be running out of cash. Besides, bragging rights continue to be with Intel as it has developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip""not much larger than the size of a finger nail""while using less electricity than most of today's home appliances. Interestingly, Intel's India Development Centre played a central role in developing this chip, titled 'Teraflops Research Chip'. As with all such long-running competition in the marketplace, while Intel and AMD slug it out, the real winner is the consumer, who can look forward to yet more powerful processors at even cheaper prices.