AMD Gears Up for Future Intel Wars

Last week, CFO Bob Rivet told analysts that the company expected to get back to break-even by year's end.

On Thursday, however, the company backed off the target slightly, dubbing it an "aspirational goal."

Rivet acknowledged Thursday that reaching break-even by the end of the year was clearly aggressive. But with the company due to spend less on manufacturing in the coming quarters, and holding operating expenses flat, Rivet said AMD needed only a lift at the top line.

"We'll sell a hell of a lot more" in the second half of the year, Rivet said, citing forthcoming products such as the Barcelona quad-core processor and the Phenom desktop PC processor.

How the Barcelona chip fares when it is released in September is an open question.

While AMD will initially ship Barcelona chips that have lower clock speeds than Intel's current products, AMD proffered test results Thursday that showed its chip outperforming Intel's product in raw performance and performance per watt.

Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said the so-called floating point test results are the most impressive he's seen for any chip at any clock speed.

But he noted that the test in question measured performance for scientific applications, rather than the general purpose tasks relevant to many corporations.

And Intel has a slew of new chips in the pipeline featuring smaller circuitry that could change the competitive landscape.

Meanwhile, Brookwood said the first glimpse of AMD's two new microprocessor cores filled an important gap in the company's so-called roadmap. "They're not just going to take iterations of their stuff and keep shrinking it," he said.

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