Is the Intel vs. AMD chip war back on?

Computerworld - With Advanced Micro Devices Inc. pushing out a slew of new products this month, its long-chilled chip war with Intel Corp. may just be heating up again, analysts say.

After struggling with delayed products and bad market and mind-share woes through 2007, a lot of industry pundits started writing off AMD. And while AMD struggled, Intel held strong over the past year and a half, coming out with quad-core chips and a 45-nanometer processor family and staying well ahead of AMD's road map.

Recently, though, AMD has begun showing some signs of life, pushing out a graphics chip set early this month and a slew of new desktop processors this week. With the first AMD Barcelona-based systems expected to hit in April, and a 65-watt quad-core desktop chip and a triple-core desktop chip now in the mix, AMD may be starting to kick back into gear.

And that kind of renewed competition between the two processor giants can only be good for the industry, said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"It's good to see AMD back in the game," he said. "They've still got a lot of issues to handle, especially financially. I don't know if I'd say they're in fighting shape. Once you dig a hole, it's hard to dig out of it. But they're definitely back in the game."

But as AMD picks up the pace, Intel isn't giving it a steady target.

Intel execs announced less than two weeks ago that the company plans to start shipping a six-core processor to resellers in the second half of this year. With 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of Level 3 cache, the six-core chip, code-named Dunnington, will be built with Intel's new 45nm technology. At the same time, Intel announced that it will start production of its upcoming 45nm, four-core Nehalem chips in the fourth quarter of this year. And Intel's quad-core, 65nm Tukwila chip, an upgrade from the Itanium family, is due out by the end of the year.

Intel is expected to flesh out more of its chip road map next week at its Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai.

The competition and innovation would be even greater if both companies were in a position to light a fire under the other, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at research firm Insight 64 in Saratoga, Calif.

"I used to think that when both these companies were firing on all cylinders, it was like watching a tennis match between two world-class players," he said. "When you have those kind of matches, then the volleys go back and forth and back and forth until somebody gets a lucky break or makes a stupid mistake. I'm hoping there's enough karma in the universe for these companies to do really well in product design and hitting releases. Lately, it's seemed that there was only enough karma for one of them. But I'm not so sure that karma is a fixed quantity. It might be possible to create karma."