Dell first in dual core desperation derbyIntel gives four away at IDFBy Mike Magee: Monday 07 March 2005, 12:27NO ONE should be surprised that Dell not only showed four Smithfield based machines at the Intel Developer Forum last week, but allowed Chipzilla to give them away to four of the attendees.Intel is adamant that machines shipping dual core Smithfield processors will be available during the second quarter of this year and if Dell can supply four complete machines to demand, then there's little doubt it can be done.But the machine we saw at the Forum was based on an ATX design - Intel does continue to brief on BTX, but we understand that people are still lukewarm about going the whole hog yet and signing up to more severe thermal specs.What's all the rush about anyway? It's as much a matter of pride as of marketing. We expect AMD now to get its skates on and to try and ensure that its dual core processors are out of the door just as fast as humanly possible. You will recall that it was only a few weeks ago that we were expecting the dual core creatures to be unavailable until the third quarter or even the fourth quarter. This wasn't guesswork on our behalf - roadmaps seen by the INQUIRER indicated that would be the case.Intel has turned on the heat on AMD - and turned down the pricing. The last roadmaps we saw from Intel were week four - out at the end of January 2005. The latest roadmaps from Intel were being worked on feverishly as late as last Friday, we understand. We expect there's much roadmappery activity going on at AMD. And for that matter at ATI, at Nvidia, at ULi, at SIS and at Via. Intel has been executing with a vengeance.We bumped into Pat Gelsinger who appeared to us to be pretty happy that things were going well for the Intel Corporation. Anecdotal reports have it that this time last year he wasn't feeling that chipper, having realised that Intel would have a long string of failures to its name during 2004. Somehow, and during the last nine months, Intel has become a re-invigorated creature and is now going full stream ahead - although there is a but, and that but is to do with the raft of dual core systems pre-announced at last week's IDF.Clever marketing, we thought. Not only would Intel show that it was ready to introduce its 8XX series with new names and new pack drills in the second quarter, it would also talk about dual and multi cores it has ready for the first quarter of 2006.It could even be earlier than that. Intel seems very confident that its 65 nanometre process is up and running quite successfully. It could certainly steal a march on AMD by announcing products such as Presler based on these plans much earlier than expected.While it may be possible for AMD to do better and launch faster its dual core Opterons and Athlon 64s, the matter of getting to 65 nanometres at the same rate as Intel appears to be an impossibility. The last we saw, AMD would convert all of its production to 90 nanometres by the middle of this year. It will lag behind Intel on moving to 65 nanometres, and it won't be able to migrate its Dresden fab to 300mm fast and far enough in advance to shrink the dies in time. We do not doubt that Intel has successfully produced 65 nanometre dies, but the quantities will be small for some little time yet.Intel did something else with last week's IDF too. It had the attention of the world's press - not just your soaraway INQ but the likes of the Wall Street Journal and all the other shareholder rags too. By pre-announcing multicore everything, and in such advance terms and with some confidence, it virtually drowned out interest in AMD's offerings, at least for a while. AMD has its Turion 64 notebook chip in the offing, but will now have to work that much harder to get everything right for its own dual core desktop and server launch. Not least, we suspect, the pricing. It will have to work hard to take up the gauntlet Intel threw down at its Forum last week. µ
