I hope everyone has had a nice Memorial Day weekend in remembrance of those who have generously fought for our country. It is a time to revisit the past and be thankful for all that we have right now as a result of their efforts. For my weekend, I took a nice weekend off from all the work and enjoyed some free time watching the French Open tennis, Roland Garros, on television.

Onto this week’s column. In the computer processor industry, there have been some major changes in terms of market presence over the past few years. One of the most major changes is Advanced Micro Devices’, or AMD’s, standing in the industry. For many years, Intel was the established frontrunner with AMD evidently fighting to stay in the race. Several years and a new CEO later, AMD has made strides and is clearly in the ‘market spotlight’. That isn’t to say they are leading Intel. AMD is now a serious contender. Most notably, Dell, the largest computer manufacturer in the nation, finally started to use AMD’s line of processors in their computer line. That, and AMD’s recent behavior in which they’ve released the AM2 socket lineup indicates AMD’s position in the market today.

For more than two decades, Dell Computers has been exclusively using Intel-based processors on their line of computers. As we all know it, these computer ranges from mobile laptops, to home desktops, to even high-end servers and workstations. On May 19, 2006, in an announcement by Dell, select quad-processor servers will be equipped with AMD Opteron processors instead of the Intel Xeon MP processor. This announcement came after a multi-year struggle from the Dell management to stay with Intel processors despite benchmarks numbers going AMD’s way. Dell’s twenty-two year exclusive purchase agreement helped buoy Intel admits stiff competition from AMD’s end. All other major computer builders (HP/Compaq, Gateway, etc) have either completely switched to AMD’s line of processors or they use both Intel processors and AMD processors. This is a major event – Dell resisted the AMD pressure for several years and now it all fell.

I want to point out another instance relating to the recent release of the AMD AM2 socket processors. With rumors of Intel’s pending release of their Core 2 Duo (Conroe) processors, AMD was in a position to answer. AMD has traditionally released new technology as quickly as possible so as to make up ground in the market. For example, their K8-based processors (Athlon 64, Opteron, Turion 64) were released as soon as they were ready to offset Intel’s Pentium 4 clockspeed barrage. This all changed with the release of the AM2 socket processors. AM2 is very similar to its predecessor, the Socket 939, except it has one more pin (PGA940), and the integrated memory controller spun into its die supports 240-pin DDR2 memory. There was speculation that AMD could have pulled the trigger on the release a while ago. However, due to the infant nature of DDR2 memory (specifically DDR2-800), AMD decided to push the release back to May 2006.

To me, these two events are a big statement of how far AMD has traveled from a few years ago. Dell has adamantly held Intel-only since its inception as “PC Limited”. While AMD’s penetration into Dell systems is limited in nature (quad-CPU servers), the fact that AMD was able to break the Dell-Intel agreement is grand statement. AMD’s handling of AM2, in my opinion, was something we haven’t seen. DDR2 was still in its early stages when Intel adopted it onto its LGA775 processors. Memory latencies were typically very high and stock wasn’t as good as normal DDR. AMD didn’t jump on the new technology – it was riding on the widely successful Athlon 64, which used normal DDR. AMD’s CEO Héctor Ruiz probably questioned: why change something that is already working well? For a perennial underdog to Intel, this is a bold statement of where AMD perceives itself in the market today.

Perhaps it’s a changing of the guard? We’ll see what Intel’s core architecture brings to Intel. Maybe it’s a double reversal of fortunes. Competition is good for consumers. But we will be looking to AMD for the latest as much as we all have for Intel. It’s AMD’s spotlight – whether they make it or break it.