Intel In Hidng

Burned by a series of production missteps and canceled products, the company lets AMD get out in front on multicore product announcements.
By Aaron Ricadela

Intel is shifting its product-development budget from traditional methods for increasing computer chips’ performance to new “multicore” designs that will debut next year, president Paul Otellini said in a keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday. But technical details about how the company will design those chips, and how much computers that use them will cost, are still uncertain.

[Original Article]

Intel. Giant of the hardware scene for more than twenty years. That can be good and bad, as we’ve seen with other industry giants.

Now, it seems, Intel is tired of getting picked on. But that flea-bite of annoyance may just cause them to pull back into their shell at the wrong time. In other times, it didn’t make all that much difference what Intel acted like, Intel was the leader and everyone knew it.

But times change. Intel’s products have come into the market behind schedule and the technological edge (in the public’s eye, anyway) has gone to AMD. Intel’s latest move, though, seems crafted to place AMD even more firmly in the lead. Intel has always done their best to discount the desktop crowd. Too plebian? Too geared towards low cost (and thereby low profit)? We will likely never know. The facts speak for themselves. Intel has always pooh-poohed the migration of high-power CPU’s to the desktop market. And history has always proven them wrong. One would think that, by this time, they would have learned- desktop users are the real power-mongers. Enterprise customers are perfectly happy to make do with something stable. You know something XEON-ish and conservative. Desktop users, most especially gamers, want all the speed and thrills hot silicon can provide. Don’t-pester-me-with-things-like-BSOD’s speed freaks.

People like that don’t care about anything but getting the most out of their systems. Intel has never played to that audience and continuing to ingore them isn’t very smart.