Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/06/come_on_punk_spoil_my/

Come on punk, spoil my day

Intel and AMD piss on each other's chips

By Andrew Thomas

Posted in Channel, 6th November 2000 17:16 GMT

Chip and Chimp Zilla aren't technology hothouses, they're global marketing operations that just happen to make chips. The ongoing megahertz™ wars between them involve large amounts of sneaky and reprehensible behaviour and backstabbing.

The latest fine example is the launch of AMD's 760 chipset, which was timed for the 30th October - a date remarkably adjacent to that originally set for Intel to debut the Pentium 4 - a cynic might observe that the date was chosen to deliberately spoil Intel's day.

But problems with the Tehama chipset meant Chipzilla had to delay the P4 launch by almost a month. AMD stuck to its guns and announced the 760 on the 30th.

This was a tad embarrassing for AMD as, had Intel actually launched P4 this week, a lot of critical attention would have gone Chipzilla's way with hacks writing dozens of stories questioning Intel's ability to ship P4 in volume and highlighting plucky AMD's technological leap forward into the wonderful world of DDR memory.

In the event, the P4 slippage caused rather more attention to be focussed on the 760 chipset than had been the original plan. And what do we find? You can't actually get your hands on a DDR Athlon box - at least not one capable of running 266MHz DDR SDRAM - until December at the earliest.

When AMD launched the 1GHz Athlon, Intel leapt into action (two days later) by announcing a 1GHz PIII that you couldn't actually buy. No why would they want to do that?

And that 1.13GHz Pentium III - didn't that come out (or not) at almost exactly at the same time as the 1.1GHz Athlon? Spooky, eh?

Of course, the most blatant dirty trick this year was Intel arranging the worst storms for a decade to sweep across Europe earlier this week, preventing hacks from reaching AMD's 760 launch in Paris. ®

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