AMD, Intel Rivalry Moves to Hand-Held Market
08/06/07 - 09:55 AM EDT
Alexei Oreskovic
Intel Advances
None of this is stopping Intel and AMD from moving ahead with plans to enter the market. Intel recently provided details of Silverthorne, a low-power chip based on the same x86 instruction set used across Intel's line of PC microprocessors. Intel is also cobbling together a so-called platform of chips to work alongside Silverthorne, stealing a page from the Centrino playbook that has proven so successful in the notebook PC market. To that end, Intel last month announced a licensing deal with SiRF Technology Holdings(SIRF Quote - Cramer on SIRF - Stock Picks), a maker of GPS chips. More significantly, Intel is betting big on WiMax, a high-speed wireless technology, investing $600 million in WiMax service provider Clearwire(CLWR Quote - Cramer on CLWR - Stock Picks) and promising to introduce its own WiMax chips. Sriram Viswanathan, who heads up Intel's WiMax program office, says the company envisions most of the handheld devices packing four different radio chips: Wi-Fi, WiMax, GPS and Bluetooth. AMD is banking on its acquisition of graphics chipmaker ATI to give it an edge in the handheld business. Its recently announced Bobcat processor will combine computing processing horsepower with graphics acceleration, in a package that AMD says will run on less than one watt of power. AMD says Bobcat will be released in 2009, putting it behind Intel, which is expected to release Silverthorne in the second quarter of 2008. But the time lag may not be as big a disadvantage as it has traditionally been in the PC business. "One of the things working for AMD is that the adoption of x86 [chips] in these end-markets is relatively nascent," says Patrick Wang, a chip analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners, which makes a market in Intel shares. Because it will likely take Intel some time to get the market to accept its x86 processors as a viable technology for handheld products, AMD may not actually be missing out on that much business early on, Wang reckons.
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