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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
AMD competes with Intel, and the public wins. The right Microsoft antitrust settlement can bring the same energy back to the software market.
Jan 16, 2002 | The personal computer industry may be in its worst slump in history, but you wouldn't know it by following the news from the processor wars. Over the past two years, Intel and AMD have unleashed an incredible competitive cycle in Silicon Valley.
In case you missed it, last week these two chip companies offered dueling releases of new flagship processors: Intel unveiled its fastest Pentium 4 yet, running at 2.2 gigahertz and built with a new .13 micron process that crams even more transistors into an even smaller space. AMD, extending the huge success and popularity of its Athlon line and the Athlon's most recent and powerful incarnation, Athlon XP, announced the XP 2000 -- a chip that actually runs at 1.67 gigahertz but, third-party tests show, nearly keeps up with the 2.2 ghz Pentium 4 in most tasks (and even surpasses it in some).
What's going on here is simple: Good old-fashioned competition drives engineers to continue to work miracles. Intel, the market-dominating behemoth, has always pushed new, improved products out the door faster -- and dropped prices more readily -- when it feels the breath of a credible competitor on its neck. For many years the competition was feeble, but that changed when AMD's Duron and Athlon chips began giving Intel a run for its money -- and, for a time in 2001, actually bested Intel for the fastest personal-computer chip title.
Today, these two companies keep spurring each other on, and consumers win big. For most of us, that's all we need to know: Computers keep getting faster and cheaper. The details are of interest only to the legions of hardware nuts, high-performance system geeks and chip-overclocking fans who flock to the Web's hardware review sites. Right?
Well, the gigahertz specs may indeed be only geek fodder, but the other details of the Intel-AMD rivalry should be of keen interest to a much bigger crowd. That's because the competitive heat driving the processor market puts the relative frigidity of another part of the computer business into bold relief. I refer, of course, to the business of designing personal-computer operating systems -- a business that Microsoft has dominated for years and that, according to the confirmed verdict of our federal courts, it now monopolizes.
What if Microsoft were challenged as strongly on its home turf as AMD is now challenging Intel? What innovations, improvements and price reductions would the public enjoy that it doesn't, today, thanks to the Microsoft monopoly? This is the big question that hangs over the continuing struggle to find a meaningful outcome to the endless Microsoft antitrust saga. And the AMD/Intel analogy is worth pursuing to try to find some answers.
Microsoft and its supporters, of course, maintain that the monopoly label is misplaced. After all, can't you buy a Macintosh without buying Microsoft Windows? Can't you obtain a PC and fire it up with any of a dozen versions of Linux or other Unix-style operating systems?
Sure you can -- and each of those operating-system alternatives has its partisans. But for use by individuals on their personal desktops, Microsoft Windows holds the overwhelming market share -- by nearly every estimate, over 90 percent. Is that simply because Windows is superior to the alternatives? There are certainly people who believe that; and, to be sure, with the release of Windows XP last year, Microsoft finally moved its flagship operating system off the aging and increasingly unstable code base it had inherited from its infancy and onto the relatively more reliable Windows NT/Windows 2000 core.
But how much faster might Microsoft have achieved that improvement if it was racing a tough competitor? And how much more incentive might the company have to produce more secure, less virus-vulnerable products today?
