"INTEL'S OTELLINI FIELDS SOFTBALLS AT THE CHURCHILL CLUB"

ZDNet's Dan Farber takes a more critical view than me of Paul Otellini interview at last week's Churchill Club event, which can be seen here:

As my colleague David Berlind wrote in his post this morning, Intel has lost the high ground (performance benchmarks) to AMD in the expanding x64 processor world and is involved in a potentially explosive antitrust litigation with AMD. While AMD has picked up some significant market share, Intel is still cruising in terms of the volume lead.

At the same time, Sun has introduced the Niagra/UltraSparc T1 chip and will start shipping T1-based Sun Fire systems on Monday that will be priced at or below x86 servers from IBM, HP or Dell. Sun is claiming that it is establishing a five-year lead over any other processor architecture and is delivering systems that consume from a half to a third of the power and half to a quarter of the space of competitive chips. Even if the claims are half true, they have to be a cause for concern for Intel as well as AMD. Faster (multicore and massively ithreaded), cooler, smaller processors that can run Solaris (a free operating system) applications without rewriting any code is a compelling selling proposition.

As I wrote a few days ago, it's time for Intel's CEO Paul Otellini to dust off Andy Groves book, "Only the Paranoid Survive : How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company," At last night's Churchill Club 20th anniversary event, Otellini was the featured guest and sat down for an interview with NPR's Moira Gunn. The softball interview touched on his 31 years at Intel, the company reorg around markets, WiMax as a step toward a global Internet and the social duties (hanging out with Prince Charles and Camilla in San Francisco) that come with being the CEO of a Silicon Valley icon. No tough questions about AMD, Sun, Itanium or antitrust suits. (full post)

It's great that Dan provided this informative post since I haven't kept up with the chip industry and its recent activities.