Intel chief rallies troops in AMD war

Intel chief executive Craig Barrett has vowed to sustain the chip giant's "aggressive" price war with AMD and intensify it over the coming months.

Speaking in London, he said that Intel would continue to develop its technology while maintaining market share. He told vnunet.com's sister publication Network News that the company had "no intention of relinquishing" its place in the market to its chief rival.

"Our attitude is that we've had 80 per cent market share for the last five years and it is our intention to stay at that level or move upwards," he maintained.

Despite a decline in the company's fortune and a "recessionary" period in the US economic cycle that started last October, Intel would "keep investing in technology regardless of the market".

This was a "necessary expense" and Barrett claimed that support for technologies, such as Rambus, were no barrier to sales of its processors. He backed up his claim with the arrival of sub-£1000 Pentium 4-based computers.

Barrett admitted that his company had been caught up in the dotcom revolution, but is now concentrating on "core fundamentals".

He claimed that the launch of Windows XP in October will give the entire industry a "bump effect", but said it was impossible to predict by just how much. New machines would all ship with the Microsoft operating system but it might take some time for the business community to follow.

Suggestions that Linux will break through to the desktop were downplayed. It has a role to play, said Barrett, but only in "servers and the back office".

He also took time out to blast BT for dragging its feet over broadband issues while the UK was leading in Europe in flat-rate internet access. He said there is a big need for a big pipe. "I've told [Sir Peter] Bonfield several times," Barrett said.