A senior Intel executive would tonight neither confirm nor deny that his company was changing its channel strategy and selling 370-pin Celerons complete with motherboard and other integrated features. But Intel has to do something to recover the situation, given that AMD has wooed its distributor channel tactically and strategically. Mike Aymar, director of Intel US' platform operation and who heads up the Katmai microprocessor family, did, however, say that his company was actively wooing the channel. A source close to Aymer (ie. sitting three people away from him) said that Intel had realised that competitor AMD had gained some channel partners because of its previous strategy. Aymar was adamant that Intel had several plans up its sleeves. He would not say whether those included extra MMX instructions (MMX3), but explained that Intel’s engineers were capable of adding that kind of functionality to the chip. The engineers could add as many as they wanted, he claimed. That would give them an edge over companies like AMD and Cyrix, he suggested. Intel could not drop its prices to a situation where it would lose money, he agreed, and illustrated this by drawing on the table of the Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. AMD, as usual, was totally unavailable for comment, being occupied in buying ever more sophisticated tape recorders, said a source. ® Click for more stories Click for story index