Intel's Comeback Bid

SAN FRANCISCO -- Hoping to put a year of competitive struggles and missteps behind it, Intel(INTC) fired the first shot in its product-comeback plan Monday.

The company announced the availability of a new microprocessor, geared for the lucrative server market, in a pair of simultaneous briefings with press and analysts here and in New York.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel is scrambling to enact a variety of measures to jump-start its flagging sales and stock price, including a massive corporate restructuring and aggressive price cuts across its product line.

But the chipmaker believes the new Xeon 5100 microprocessor, formerly code-named Woodcrest, will offer the first and most tangible evidence of its comeback.

"We're back," said Tom Kilroy, the general manager of Intel's enterprise group.

Not all observers share Intel's same sense of optimism and fate that the company is on the brink of turning a corner. There is little disagreement, though, about the pressing need for Intel to show that it still has the innovative drive and discipline to be a leader in the tech industry.

The dual-core processor is designed for computer servers found in corporate data centers, where rival Advanced Micro Devices(AMD) has made some of its biggest gains, thanks to its popular Opteron processor.

The Xeon 5100 gives the industry its first taste of Intel's new microarchitecture, which will also be featured in the forthcoming processors for desktop and laptop PCs released later this summer. All three processors will be manufactured with 65-nanometer circuitry, the most advanced in the industry.

At the briefing with press and analysts, Intel executives outlined the technological merits of the new Xeon processor and its overall platform, ticking off sundry technological traits like a 4-MB shared cache, the use of fully buffered DIMM memory and the efficiency of the front-side bus.