A senior executive at AMD has hit back at internal Intel fabrication plant figures and said his company will have 30 per cent PC market share in the year 2001. Rana Mainee, market analyst at AMD Europe, also responded to Intel figures saying that its Willamette processor would be double the performance of a K7 666MHz part. He said it was highly unlikely Intel's Willamette would out-perform K7s by 18 months. "As we've said we will launch K7 500MHz parts in June and faster parts during the course of this year, that's hardly likely," he said. Mainee was responding to these stories: How Intel's geese lay golden eggs and Willamette will outperform K7 by 2X. Mainee said: "Certainly the [AMD] fab capacities are in line with what we've said before but I'm not going to commit to any numbers. "The PC market is about 115-120 million today and we're looking at a growth rate of say 15 per cent for the next two years. Our growth rate will be far higher than 15 per cent in terms of units." He said: "We're close to achieving 30 per cent market share of all PC in the year 2001. [Fab] capacity will certainly increase." Mainee said AMD was still committed to maintaining its prices against Intel's, as he said it would at the end of last year. "We are still working hard to be independent of Intel's pricing structure," he said. "There's a great deal of work we're doing which will get us to a better state of affairs in the marketplace." He admitted that Intel's aggressive price slashing on Celerons during the course of this year had made that difficult. He pointed out that the Intel roadmap we have just published show that it is now concentrating on slashing the price of Pentium IIIs rather than Celerons. (See Intel desktop pricing revealed until September). We reported last weekend that the price of Pentium III 450Mhz/500MHz chips s will drop by nearly a half over the next six months. "There's a great deal of work we're doing which will get us to a better state of affairs in the marketplace," he said. "The market itself is beginning to notice our growth and different segments of the market react with different time lags." He said the consumer market moved very fast, while other parts of the market took longer to move AMD parts into their plans. "In terms of what we've achieved over the last seven quarters, it shows substantial growth," he said. "We produced three times more processors in the last Q1 as we did in the Q1 before." He said: "We're producing better microprocessors and we've a lot of industry support. Intel is obviously working hard to re-articulate its plans. This is shaping up to be a gladiatoral contest. You [Intel] don't lose 10 per cent of market share in 12 months without something having to be done about it." ®