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[Izzy]

One sign that Intel is having trouble dancing to technology's current beat may be the world's most expensive disco ball.

For a company holiday party next month, a handful of engineers assembled a disco ball - with hundreds of small reflective devices - to hang above the dance floor. The mirrors are leftover projection-television chips from Intel's planned effort to enter the digital television market - an effort the company recently abandoned only 10 months after a splashy introduction at the Consumer Electronics Show last January.

The TV effort became yet another in a series of embarrassing stumbles for Intel. The company has publicly canceled a succession of high-profile projects, has replaced managers in money-losing ventures and has fallen behind its keen competitor Advanced Micro Devices in introducing technologies, like a feature that wards off viruses and worms, in markets that Intel has long dominated.

A.M.D. has been so successful in stealing the spotlight from Intel lately that Kevin B. Rollins, the president of one of Intel's biggest customers, Dell Computer, said at a financial conference call this month that Dell was considering adding computers with A.M.D. chips to its product line.

But some of the company's marketing problems may become more acute before they are resolved. Until recently, selling Intel chips was easy: faster was better. Now, Mr. Otellini said, Intel intends to play the same game with the number of processor cores that can be embedded on a chip. The hope is that by breaking problems into parts that can be computed by separate cores simultaneously, chips will continue to offer better performance.

The problem with the strategy is that so far Intel is trailing A.M.D., I.B.M. and Sun Microsystems, who all have their own aggressive multicore chip strategies.

Yet Intel's challenge in entering new markets also runs deeper, according to an engineer who worked on the ill-fated digital television project and insisted on not being identified. The engineer said that the company's failure to perfect the technology, known as liquid crystal on silicon, or LCOS, came from its inability to think beyond its expertise in manufacturing digital circuits. The company's failure was that it did not search for outside expertise soon enough.

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[Willco]

SELL YOUR PENTIUMS ITS ALL OVER

 

[Phoenix]

Link

Current Intel is being led by the nose by AMD. When you start seeing people asking for Opteron based servers in large numbers and seeing many big name server manus selling them, you know that the tide has turned. The only cool thing we've gotten out of Intel in a while is Hyperthreading, and that is more to deal with the design of their long pipelined chips than it is an overall CPU innovation.

 

[Culex]

Current Intel is being led by the nose by AMD. When you start seeing people asking for Opteron based servers in large numbers and seeing many big name server manus selling them, you know that the tide has turned. The only cool thing we've gotten out of Intel in a while is Hyperthreading, and that is more to deal with the design of their long pipelined chips than it is an overall CPU innovation.

If AMD ever found a way to improve multi-threading, Intel would be toast.

I think the final blow will be if Dell, the most influential company that sells servers, goes with AMD. Intel will truly be crying if that EVER happens.

 

[Outdoor Miner]

Wow, if Dell switches to AMD, that would be a huge blow to Intel.

 

[sonycowboy]

This is sooo barely related to gaming.

Why not post every thread at Slashdot?

IBL.

 

[lexi]

I remember reading a while back that if AMD's fortunes didn't turn soon, they were in big financial trouble. It's good to see that they're doing well. Here's to releasing better consumer products for reasonable prices!

 

[Culex]

I remember reading a while back that if AMD's fortunes didn't turn soon, they were in big financial trouble. It's good to see that they're doing well. Here's to releasing better consumer products for reasonable prices!

Prior to the first release of it's Athlon 64 chips, AMD was in big financial trouble. It had invested so much money into the tech, that if it didn't succeed.....

Well, you know, Chapter 11.

 

[AirBrian]

If AMD ever found a way to improve multi-threading, Intel would be toast.

I think the final blow will be if Dell, the most influential company that sells servers, goes with AMD. Intel will truly be crying if that EVER happens.

Dell has been talking about selling AMD for awhile now, and just Dell considering it has had an effect. :lol

Intel has finally started to be more aggressive with pricing, but I think the damage has already been done in the mind's of consumers.

 

[Bregor]

I've been hearing 'Dell will start selling AMD' rumors ever since the introduction of the original Athlon. You've got to remember that Intel gives Dell an extremely sweet price on the CPUs they buy- that makes a big difference in profits. I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[Culex]

Dell has been talking about selling AMD for awhile now, and just Dell considering it has had an effect. :lol

Intel has finally started to be more aggressive with pricing, but I think the damage has already been done.

Gaming performance is also becoming a much bigger selling factor for chips these days than it was in the past. Since AMD has been leading the way after the unveiling of the Athlon 64, they are sitting in the preverbial drivers' seat.

 

[DonasaurusRex]

i wouldnt worry about hyperthreading much longer, with dual core on the horizon it wont really matter. Yes hyperthreading worked when the the software was optimized for that huge pipeline, but it was more a way of avoiding the penalty the p4 would get if the wrong instruction was in that HUGE pipeline and it had to be flushed. Since intel has scrapped the p4 and its successor, (Tejas was it?) it remains to be seen if that huge pipeline and hyper threading will come into play from now on. Intel still has a shot, they better hope AMD hasnt found a way to scale up their processors past 3ghz with good yields. Because if they throw a punch and boom all of a sudden amd counters (and they do have counters they just dont have to release them right now) with higher clock processors Intel could be in big shiz for quite some time.