AMD ups Athlon speed

March 22, 2001: 12:15 a.m. ET

Microprocessor maker pits new chips against Intel's new Pentium 4
By Staff Writer Richard Richtmyer

NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday is introducing faster versions of its Athlon-brand microprocessors, which it claims outperform competing Pentium 4 processors from Intel.

In recent years, the two chipmakers have engaged in a fierce battle of one-upmanship as they vied for the title of microprocessor king, with each trying to outdo the other with incremental increases in microprocessor clock speeds.

Intel gained the advantage over its smaller rival late last year when it introduced the Pentium 4, which operates at speeds up to 1.5 gigahertz. Those chips, slated to replace Intel's Pentium 3 line by 2002, are built on a whole new architecture, called "Net Burst," which Intel says is designed to optimize multimedia applications and can handle much higher clock speeds.

By the third quarter of this year, Intel is aiming to introduce a Pentium 4 processor that operates at 2 GHz.



	We've concentrated on delivering good overall performance. The megahertz rating is not our big thing.



	Mark de Frere Advanced Micro Devices

AMD's latest Athlon chips, which currently are available in personal computers from vendors including Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, operate at 1.3 GHz and 1.33 GHz. And while that still falls short of Intel's fastest processors, AMD claims that they outperform Intel's speediest chips in many common computing tasks.

For example, AMD pointed to standard industry benchmark tests it conducted of similarly configured PCs -- one with an 1.33 GHz Athlon and another with a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 – that show the AMD-based system performing up to 87 percent better in certain audio, video and image-editing tasks, and up to 36 percent better when running basic office application software.

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"We've concentrated on delivering good overall performance," said Mark de Frere, product manager for AMD's Athlon product line. "The megahertz rating is not our big thing."

AMD has been able to boost the overall system performance of PCs using the Athlon chips by doing things such as optimizing them to work with newer high-speed memory systems called double data-rate, or DDR, which allow computers to send and receive twice as much data with every beat of the system clock than previous memory systems, de Frere said.

Another way AMD has been able to boost the performance of Athlon-based systems is by increasing the amount of data available in the on-chip cache. A microprocessor's cache temporarily stores data that it needs to get repeatedly, such as instructions from the operating system.

The new Athlon processors have a total of 384 kilobytes of cache on board.

In lots of 1,000 or more, the 1.33 GHz Athlons are currently priced at $350 apiece. The 1.3 GHz Athlons are available at $318 each in 1,000-unit quantities.

Both AMD and Intel have become increasingly aggressive in pricing their chips in the face of much weaker PC sales, especially in the U.S., where the maturing market has been further weakened by a slowing economy.

AMD's Athlon processors, as well as its "Duron" line which is aimed at lower-cost PCs, represent the company's seventh generation of microprocessors. And their popularity over the past year has made the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based outfit a more serious competitor to Intel, its much larger, deep-pocketed rival.

In the fourth quarter, AMD garnered roughly 17 percent of the global PC processor market share to Intel's 81.7 percent, according to Mercury Research.

Moving forward, AMD plans to introduce an Athlon processor operating at 1.5 GHz during the second half of this year, according to de Frere. The company is planning to introduce its eighth generation of microprocessors, aimed at network servers and workstations, in the first half of 2002, he said.

Shares of AMD (AMD: Research, Estimates) rose 86 cents to $23.29 on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, a 3.8 percent gain. At the same time, Intel (INTC: Research, Estimates) shares finished 94 cents higher at $25.56 on Nasdaq, a 3.8 percent gain on the day.