April 28, 2008
Intel and AMD’s different classes of business
Intel is taking the high road and its rival Advanced Micro Devices the low one in search of market share in different business segments, according to announcements on Monday.
Intel unveiled a partnership with the Cray supercomputing company. In an industry first, their engineers will work together on creating a new supercomputer for release around 2012.
They aim to reduce dramatically processing times for intensive applications such as medical imaging, cell modelling in genome research and hurricane forecasting. The high-performance computing market was worth $11.5bn last year, according to the IDC research firm.
Kirk Skaugen (pictured left), head of Intel’s Server Platforms group, and Peter Ungaro (right), Cray chief executive, told me that synergies between the two companies’ research teams would help them solve problems where components interconnected. This was key to keeping processors fed with data and operating at maximum performance.
They would also work on how to take advantage of what is expected to be a grouping of as many as 1m processing cores in a single supercomputing system.
The two companies say they will work with academic institutions and government bodies to test their products.
Meanwhile, AMD introduced its AMD Business Class, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. This is a new platform of chips designed to help PC makers target this segment with products. Both dual, triple and quad-core processors are featured combined with AMD and non-AMD graphics and chipsets.
Acer, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and Lenovo all announced their support for the initiative.
