AMD, Intel In Dual-Core Horse Race

However, an executive of the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said he does not believe the pre-announcement will freeze the market, and added that several Taiwanese manufacturers are expected to ship motherboards later this year compatible with both single-core and dual core processors.

"I really want the white box suppliers to understand this should accelerate this business and not in anyway delay it," said Barry Crume, AMD's director of Product Planning for the Server/Workstation Business segment. Crume said system builders will be able to "sell systems that are already dual-core, pre enabled" before dual-core chips are on the market.

AMD, in a rivalry with chip giant Intel that has begun to heat up over the past several months, said it will be shipping dual-core processors into the market in mid-2005 for servers, and for high-end client PCs in the second half of 2005.

Last month, Intel said it would hasten its move to dual-core processors and begin shipping them by next year, eventually including them throughout its product line from notebooks to servers.

Crume said AMD made its pre-announcement in light of the market acceptance of its 64-bit Opteron processor for servers.

"I would say for AMD, this is new territory," Crume said. "We wanted to mark that milestone in the industry. We are, I would say, developing our personality here in the industry and wanting to keep end users and our partner customers informed about our progress."

Crume said that while AMD has a design in place for the dual-core, x86-based processors, the company does not yet have any production samples of a processor yet in hand. "We haven't made silicon yet," Crume said. "We have only done some test runs on the database. We will have first silicon in the next few weeks."

Several weeks ago, when discussing their own dual-core plans with financial analysts in New York, Intel executives held up a wafer for its upcoming, dual-core Montecito processor " announcing it had reached first silicon on the technology. An Intel spokesman, though, could not say when testing samples would be available.

For system builders, the dual-core news from both Intel and AMD did not appear to have an immediate impact.

"We see it as a roadmap right now," said Ray Rueda, president of Honor International, a Miami-based solution provider and system builder. "We don't see a lot of (interest), not even from our end users."

However, Rueda did say he believes the technology could be important in spurring sales when the processors ship to market " provided there is clear evidence dual core technology will boost performance.

"Obviously, it has to be seen as increasing performance in real-life applications," Rueda said. "We have good hope with this dual-core processor technology. It has potential to make all the corporate customers renew their old equipment."

And despite the pre-announcements, there didn't appear to be much belief of an overnight change in the market.

"It's probably going to take a little bit until we have a real product, and it's road-tested for people to kind of come around," said Jonathan Landy, national accounts manager for Rackmaster Systems, a Shakopee, Minn.-based system builder. "Also, price is a big issue " it always is."