10 Things You Should Know About Intel vs. AMD

After struggling for several years against AMD and its portfolio of Opteron processors, Intel charged back in 2007, ramping up its Core microarchitecture and regaining momentum in the chip builder race. Now its AMD struggling but looking for a renewal wi

Intel–Paul Otellini, CEO and president since May 2005.

– The initial ones are multi-chip, but so what? You guys are misreading the market if you think people care whats in the package.” – Otellini on criticism that Intels qu

Intel–88,000 As one of the cornerstone companies of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel remains one of the largest IT companies in the world.

AMD–16,500 Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., but with sizable operations in Austin, Texas,

Intel, as the larger rival, more than doubles AMDs “fabs,” a term used both for the companies foundries and fabrication plants.

Intel 12 in North America, Israel and Ireland. Two more on the way.

AMD 5 in Dresden, Germany, an

Intel remains the market leader when it comes to x86 microprocessors, but AMD has gained back some of the share it lost.

• Intel–76 percent, up from 73 percent

• AMD–23 percent, up from 22 percent

– Source: Mercury Research, second qua

Gross margins tell a good deal about how each companys chips are selling and what sort of market share it is capturing.

Intel–47 percent, down from the first quarter (50.1 percent) but better than the past few quarters, which shows customers are res

AMD and Intel released new quad-core processors in the summer of 2007.

Intel–x7350 quad-core processor ties two, dual-core chips together on a single die. – 2.93GHz – 130 watts thermal envelope – 1066MHz front-side bus – 8MB of L

In the past year, the two companies have been trying to one-up each other with partner agreements.

Intel–In 2007, it added Sun Microsystems, the only major OEM to have had an exclusive deal with AMD. Intel still has Apple to itself.

AMD–Afte

Each company is looking to bring virtualization down to the chip level.

AMD–AMD has emphasized its own virtualization technology, AMD-V, that executives said will offer better support for live virtual machine migration and support for 64-bit guest

Intel–Will bring its first 45-nanometer processors, “Penryn,” to the market for high-end game systems, enterprise-class servers and workstations.

AMD–Will refresh its desktop line with a quad-core processor known as Phenom, which share

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