IDF, Fall 2005: AMD invites Intel to dual-core duel

By Tim Danton in San Francisco

Posted on 24 Aug 2005 at 07:20

As he enjoyed his breakfast coffee on the opening day of IDF, the last thing Intel's CEO wanted to see was the name of competitor AMD. But it was worse than that: AMD had cheekily bought a full-page advert in a San Francisco newspaper inviting its rival to a duel: a dual-core duel, pitting the Pentium D against the Athlon 64 X2 in a benchmark shoot-out.

For some reason, Paul Otellini chose to ignore this fact during his keynote address to the thousands of IDF attendees, but in the following question-and-answer session the advert was inevitably brought up by one of the attending journalists. Did you see it, Otellini was asked.

'Yes. And it spoilt my coffee,' he replied in jocular fashion. When asked if he intended to take up the offer, he seemed to lose some of his sense of humour. 'We let our products do the talking on the market place,' he said. We took that as a no.