Posted by Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst, Enderle Group
There is a lot going on this week in terms of laptop PCs thanks to the arrival of Intel’s new Santa Rosa chipset. But this isn’t just about Intel, new AMD products are rolling to market as well and both come with refreshed graphics and storage options.
Monterey (CA) – AMD is getting more aggressive in discussing technologies that are cooking in the company’s labs. What we learned today is that Agena, the firm’s upcoming desktop quad-core processor in fact is alive and kicking and stream processing may very well reach beyond the enterprise application market and finally enable high-powered consumer applications the IT industry promised ten years ago.
Monterey (CA) – At an event held in Monterey today, AMD showed a wafer with “fully functional” 45 nm silicon for the first time.
According to chief technology officer Phil Hester, the 300 mm wafer code-named “Typhoon”, shown in public for the first time today, holds 45 nm dies combining SRAM and logic. The executive said that AMD’s 45 nm process is on track and recent notes from Intel that AMD is facing yield issues “are rubbish” and “wishful thinking on their side”.
Santa Clara (CA) – Intel today launched four new Core 2 Duo processors as part of the much anticipated “Santa Rosa” platform, which not only enhances the Centrino platform core components, but offers completely new features such as optional flash cache as well as wireless broadband capability.
Investors and shareholders questioned the competitiveness of AMD’s current semiconductor manufacturing technology as well as the firm’s information policy about upcoming products during a shareholder meeting yesterday.
New York (NY) – Intel is betting large parts of its business for the next two years on its upcoming 45 nm process technology. At an analyst meeting today in New York, the company updated its vision on how to “return to innovation” and showed confidence that its 45 nm technology is “18 to 24 months ahead of the competition.”
