What's The Score?

By Damon Poeter

In winner-take-all contests, it's easy to dismiss the accomplishments of the second-place finisher, even if the victor only won by the slimmest of statistical margins. Indeed, in some of the 2008 VARBusiness Annual Report Card survey categories, the difference between first place, second place and even third place really isn't all that much.

Client and Server Processors is not one of those categories.

Intel Corp.'s ARC win over runner-up Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in the Client and Server Processors category was the equivalent of a landslide victory in a presidential election. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant scored an overall 79 and beat AMD by at least 12 points in all three ARC criteria—product innovation, support and partnership. Intel also bested AMD in all 17 subcategories of the ARC survey.

Intel's new co-CIO Diane Bryant said the predictability of the vendor's "tick-tock" model of product innovation and steady investment in a partner ecosystem are the keys to Intel's success.

"When you look at what it takes to deliver a high-performance solution to the market, it starts with the silicon products we deliver. But then you need the system integrators, the software environment and the whole ecosystem, and Intel invests heavily in building out that ecosystem," Bryant said.

Partners such as Falcon Northwest depend on Intel to deliver in-demand products in a timely fashion, said Bradd Berdelman, general manager of the Medford, Ore.-based builder of enthusiast systems.

"You know, product innovation in general isn't just about execution on a specific product's performance, it's about bringing a product to market that consumers actually want," he said. Berdelman also said he wasn't surprised by Intel's strong showing in the various Partnership ratings, but added that AMD wasn't far behind its larger competitor on channel-specific performance.

Product delivery issues plagued Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD at the start of 2007. The chip maker's financials continued to suffer for a second straight year, due in part to the costly acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI and the delayed rollout of its first quad-core client and server processors.

Which isn't to say there isn't potential good news on the horizon for AMD. The chip maker said it's on track to match Intel's 45-nanometer fabrication process for CPUs by year's end, while on the GPU front, the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series has been cutting chunks out of rival Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia Corp.'s discrete graphics market share, according to partners.

"Last year, our product mix was 90 percent Nvidia to 10 percent ATI," said Darren Su, executive VP of El Monte, Calif.-based system integrator iBuyPower. "In mid-September, that ratio is already 70 to 30, and we expect it to switch around to 60 or even 70 percent ATI by the end of the year."

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