AMD chips away at rival

AMD has set off in pursuit of rival Intel with an enhanced version of its Athlon processor that runs at 1Ghz and uses copper circuitry.

The chip, formerly codenamed Thunderbird is now called simply Athlon.

It was launched last week at AMD's manufacturing plant in Germany, where all the company's copper chips will be manufactured.

Industry experts have said that if AMD is able to provide sufficient supplies of the processors it could be the company's chance to win business from arch-rival Intel.

Gartner analyst Thomas Reuner said: "Because of delivery problems Intel is struggling to supply processors, particularly Pentium IIIs. As long as AMD is capable of delivering the new chips it may be able to win business from Intel in the corporate market.

"Consumer perception of AMD is very strong but it needs to make in-roads into the business desktop market to take on Intel. Availability is the key, and is more important than any new product launch." Athlon has an on-die cache running at full speed that boosts its performance. It will be available at six speeds, ranging from 750Mhz to 1Ghz.

Five PC manufacturers have committed to manufacturing computers using Athlon: Compaq, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu Siemens and Gateway.

A low-end version of Athlon, called Duron will be available later this month.

Richard Baker, regional marketing director for AMD's PC products division, said the Duron chip, codenamed Spitfire, is "where we're expecting to make our big push into the business market".

However, many analysts have said that Intel and AMD are focusing on marketing rather than what customers want. Many have questioned the need for such high-speed chips.