AMD Chief Aims to Break Intel Monopoly

Advanced Micro Devices(AMD) aims to substantially boost its share of the microprocessor market over the next five years, undermining the near-monopoly now enjoyed by Intel(INTC), according to comments by Chief Executive Officer Hector Ruiz quoted in Reuters.

Ruiz said he wants AMD to account for as much as 25% of the total microprocessor market, measured in dollars, up from its current 10%. He plans to do so by developing more unique silicon and becoming more cost efficient internally.

"We think over a period of three to five years we can accomplish a solid position in a true duopoly as opposed to a monopoly," Ruiz told Reuters.

An AMD representative was not available for further comment.

Over the past year, AMD has made considerable headway in the server chip market with its well-received Opteron silicon, which has a memory architecture that gives it some performance advantages over rival Intel's offerings. Indeed, analysts credit AMD for stepping up competition against Intel in both its microprocessors and flash memory business lines.

However, underscoring the challenges that remain for AMD, the chipmaker still owns only a sliver of the server chip market despite its progress with Opteron.

In the second quarter of 2003, AMD shipped a mere $110 million in server chips compared with Intel's $4.6 billion in shipments, according to Gartner. Since then, Opteron scored some major design wins, helping it nearly double shipments to 205,000 as of the second quarter this year.

But it still lagged far behind Intel's 5.4 million shipments.

In recent trading, AMD was up 23 cents, or 2%, to $11.66.

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