AMD-Intel rivalry gets ferocious

NewsFactor Network writes “Ben Anixter, AMD’s vice president of external affairs, points to new data from Gartner Dataquest showing that 27 percent of desktop PCs sold in the United States in the third quarter contained Athlon chips. Meanwhile, AMD is preparing a new line of chips, the Hammer series, to challenge Intel’s nascent Itanium processors. Both Hammer and Itanium are designed to process data 64 bits at a time, compared to today’s 32-bit processors. The result is an ability to handle vastly larger databases. But the Itanium won’t be able to run today’s 32-bit software without special emulation programs that slow down performance. Hammer will run 32-bit programs directly, as well as 64-bit software.”