[H]ardNews 6th Edition - Intel vs AMD Edition

The Grand Match, strategies within strategies here is a set of the latest blow by blow coverage.

Half Price D's

Intel has captured the initiative in the dual core desktop market by lowballing the Pentium D's at half the price of the AMD X2's. ExtremeTech gives some insight into the how and why.

"The discrepancy casts the differences between AMD and Intel into sharp focus. All of Intel's production fabs are producing wafers using 90-nm wafers; AMD has but a single fab. As AMD and Intel segment their product lines to meet the needs of divergent markets, AMD's fab capacity may be stretched thinner."

The Opteron Salient

While Intel has focused on the dual core desktop, AMD has been going for the throat of the server market and has been scoring points. Niche marketing has set them well on their way to capturing a 10% market share, and dual cores make the offering all that more attractive to mainstream sectors with the release of 64-bit Windows Server 2003.

"The Opteron, which arrived a little over two years ago, had been a niche player, occupying areas such as high-performance computing clusters. But the latest version of the chip, which is beginning to arrive at businesses in new servers, has headed into the mainstream of the corporate server market."

Of DRM, AMT & TPM

Intel has been pushing the 'Platform' aspect of their new chips, the package of processor, chipset, and peripheral I/O, eWeek covers how PC manufacturers are and aren't implementing the new Professional Business Platform's Active Management Technology & Trusted Platform Module. Digitmag and PC World cover the Digital Rights Management Package.

"The new offerings come DRM-enabled and will, at least in theory, allow copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the operating system as is currently the case. While Intel steered clear of mentioning the new DRM technology, Intel's Australian technical manager Graham Tucker publicly confirmed Microsoft-flavoured DRM technology will be a feature of Pentium D and 945."