Faster product designs the best way to beat competition: Intel

In an industry where the go-to-market time cycle is reducing and subsequently
fuelling a competitive war, Intel has decided to fight this by speeding its
design cycle, Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel announced. The news came during the
Morgan Stanley Technology Conference held in San Francisco, where Otellini said
this was the best way to tackle competition from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Facing a market glut of microprocessors and weak corporate demand for PCs
running Microsoft's new Windows Vista OS, Intel hoped to stay profitable by
producing new chip designs faster than its competitors. “There's clearly more
capacity to build microprocessors than there is demand in 2007, and probably in
2008,” Otellini emphasized.

Intel has been watching the growing popularity of AMD and knows that the
latter means business now. Rather than embark on a head-to-head processor
pricing war with its rival, Intel must return to the quick development habits it
used when producing its Pentium family of chips, Otellini said. Intel backed off
that pace after producing the Pentium 4, and soon began to lose marketshare when
AMD launched the Opteron chip in 2003.

“We're doing product refreshes every two years, which is the model we
invented, and then stopped doing after Pentium 4, shame on us,” Otellini said.
“We fell off it-mea culpa, we screwed up-and now we're back on that pace.”

Falling back on old habits, it has announced a pace of upgrading its
processor architecture and shrinking its transistor geometry in alternating
years. That puts Intel on schedule to upgrade its 65-nanometer Core 2 Duo
processor to a 'Penryn' 45nm geometry chip in 2007. The following year, Intel
will upgrade its core micro