October 29, 2005

Intel to Lag AMD for Four More Years

That being said, it's a pretty amazing marketing job when you continue to have dominant market share when your products are slower and more expensive. Someone in the Intel marketing and business development department deserves their bonuses this year.

Dual-core Itanium chip production slowed because of quality concerns. A sophisticated future Xeon processor was cancelled. Plans to unite the Itanium and Xeon lines around a common architecture to make servers more affordable and faster have been pushed out likely until 2009. In short, bad news for Intel customers.

Underneath all of these roadmap adjustments lurk some painful technology slips that must have customers concerned. In particular, it now appears that Intel will stay married to its front side bus dependency for much longer than previously expected and will fail to deliver integrated memory controllers on time. Where Intel had a very real shot at closing the gap with AMD in just 18 months on previous roadmaps, it now looks more likely to trail for close to four years.