AMD will take the lead in 2009?
Lately, AMD has lost the leading position in the high-end consumer market, leaving the crown to Intel, who has been king in the high-performance CPU market. But there is plenty of room for AMD to deal with the energy efficient market. Without the performance punch, AMD’s processors are taken into consideration only when it comes to talking about the best performance/price ratio – which is where AMD can supply quite a few decent products. From this point of view, it appears that the situation is going to remain the same until 2009.
On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that the beginning of next year is going to revitalize AMD, to be number 1 in the CPU business. Actually, the company is expected to provide a decent competitor for Intel’s soon-to-be released Nehalems processor only in the second semester of 2009. According to various sources, AMD’s new 45nm Deneb and Propus processors won’t immediately solve the problems of the AMD. Although Deneb will be significantly faster than the Barcelona or Agena cores, they won’t stand much of a chance versus the Intel’s Nehalem processor.
Sometime during the second half of 2008, AMD is expected to start a manufacturing process transition. However, until the company gets high K, its 45nm-enabled CPUs aren’t going to provide any major improvement in performance, and they will most certainly not be able to beat the Intel’s new lineup of CPUs.
Intel’s Nehalem and Yorkfield together with the dual-core Penryns are already using high K 45nm and, apparently, Nehalem’s transistors are more efficient than AMD’s, at least when it comes to this manufacturing process.
In conclsion, even if AMD does not become a real competitor for Intel’s high-performance lineup, any news of a possible comeback should please the AMD fans out there – back in the days when AMD’s CPUs still were among the all-time favorites, especially in the gaming communities.
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