SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The move by AMD, which until the middle of last year had a leg up on its far larger rival Intel Corp, could help it garner a bigger portion of the overall desktop personal computer market, the Sunnyvale, California, company said. AMD and Intel currently sell processors with a single, double and quadruple, or quad, cores, the central computing engines found in computers. With AMD’s Phenom triple-core chip, AMD hopes to speed the adoption of multi-core chips, since sales of PCs with quad-core chips have been lackluster.
In the second quarter of 2007, fewer than 2 percent of desktop PCs sold used quad-core processors, according to consultancy Mercury Research. By regulating the speed at which each core operates, AMD could conceivably sell a triple-core chip that has higher performance metrics than one of its own quad-core chips, said Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood.
“If they can get three cores that are higher performing than a quad-core, that will be a really fascinating trade-off,” Brookwood said. But AMD would need to tread carefully in how it sells the chips to consumers, Brookwood said.
Source: Reuters