Late last year it appeared that AMD might finally be winning a vital battle  not with its arch rival Intel, but against the prejudices of buyers and PC makers. While Intel struggled to stick to its processor roadmap and faced problems with Rambus memory, AMD was able to launch ever faster Athlons backed by inexpensive double data rate DDR SDRAM memory. At the start of this year AMD looked ready to claim a place on many corporate procurement lists.
But more recently AMD has lost that impetus and become the one to struggle. Last week it finally released its dual-processor Athlon chipset for workstations and servers, but delays meant that it launched after Intel's high-profile Xeon chip. Now major vendors are offering high-performance Xeon workstation systems with immediate availability, while AMD has yet to announce when dual-Athlon systems will ship.
AMD has worked hard at matching Intel on processor performance and has even managed to surpass it in some areas. The dual-Athlon system seemed, on paper, to be a potential winner. Sadly, while some AMD 760MP symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) systems may be currently under evaluation with potential customers, they are not available to buy. Taiwan's leading motherboard manufacturers are also reported to be scrapping development ofDDR-SDRAM motherboards, amid claims that they offer only slightly better performance than standard SDRAM boards.
Xeon is an important chip for Intel for workstations and entry-level servers, as the existing Pentium 4 is limited to single-processor configurations. Xeon SMP servers will follow later in the year, says Mike Fister, vice president and general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. Intel expects new Xeon-based workstations to perform 30 to 90 percent better than systems using their predecessor, the Pentium III Xeon.
Compaq, Dell, HP and IBM are all expected to ship workstations based on the Xeon processor this quarter. According to analyst firm IDC, Intel-based workstations accounted for more than 70 percent of all workstation shipments in the fourth quarter of 2000.
Rather than attacking Intel on all corporate fronts, AMD is currently concentrating its efforts on selling to public authorities, with some success.
'These guys are less brand-sensitive and more interested in getting best value,' said AMD's European marketing manager, Richard Baker. 'The common infrastructure of our Athlon and Duron products is very appealing to them.' He added that AMD currently has about 11 percent of this market, according to its own figures. 'When we started focusing on this area about nine months ago, our market share was negligible,' Baker said.
It appears that the development of supporting infrastructure such as motherboard chipsets and memory is letting AMD down. For well over a year the company has backed DDR-SDRAM, while Intel has maintained its preference for Rambus RDRAM, at least for volume desktops, workstations and entry-level servers. With doubts now being voiced by many AMD partners about the performance boost offered by DDR-SDRAM over standard SDRAM  some estimates put it at as low as 10 percent  RDRAM may yet be the better option.
It may be that AMD or chipset partners such as SiS already have Rambus chipsets for the Athlon ready and waiting, just in case. Whatever AMD has up its sleeve, it needs to deliver it soon if it is to challenge Intel. Most large companies use only Intel systems, and if Intel can open up the performance gap between itself and AMD again, customers will see very little reason to change.
