IDF Fall 2006: Intel chief - 'I hate AMD'

 

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Posted on 27 Sep 2006 at 20:27

He didn't say it out loud, but he typed it out loud. And he did it in a keynote this morning in front of a couple of thousand assembled IDF attendees. Intel's Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group was in full stage-roleplay mode. He was playing the part of the sucker without the protected Intel vPro PC, typing his bank details into a phishing website.

Whether on the spur of the moment or as part of what seems to be an emerging company-wide AMD-bashing agenda, after typing a random number as his username - projected for the audience's benefit onto one of the 20-foot screens at the front of the auditorium - he slowly keyed in his mock password: 'i hate amd'.

Not the most magnanimous of gestures, but the rivalry between the two manufacturers and claims over who owns the commodity server space - Intel with its new Xeon 5x00 series or AMD with its established Opterons - is getting increasingly playground. The gloves are off and the claws are out, in an explicit fashion I've never seen before at IDF.

Yesterday, Justin Rattner, chief technology officer and director of Intel's Corporate Technology Group, had his Dustbin of Obsolete Technology on stage. The flimsy excuse for its presence was to consign one of Intel's own previous-generation power supply designs to the trash. But as he was tossing it away, the seemingly off-the-cuff remark that escaped his lips was, 'Wait, is that an Opteron I see in there?'

Today, Gelsinger repeatedly rammed home the vapourware angle as regards AMD's quad-core 'Barcelona' Opteron announcements: 'The server version of quad-core, we'll have a million units before the competition ships one.'

Addressing AMD's claims that native quad core is somehow inherently more advanced than Intel's approach of two dual-core dies in one package, Gelsinger cited reduced time to market, 20% higher yield and 10% lower manufacturing costs, stating emphatically that, 'This is the right way to do quad core on 65nm.'

He also tackled head-on AMD's position that its total platform power consumption is lower, presenting a Xeon 5100 system against an Opteron-based server, the specific model of which went curiously unnamed save to say that it was an F series (one of the latest Opterons). Power meters running in real time showed the Xeon system apparently running at least 20W under the Opteron at full load.

It's not a totally one-way catfight. Last week, at an AMD briefing in London on the very Barcelona technology that Gelsinger was deriding, an AMD executive was heard to say that, 'Intel is a monopoly company that abuses its monopoly position'. Ouch.

Author: David Fearon, San Francisco