AMD launches chips to rival Intel products

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, JUNE 20. AMD today launched the 1.4 ghz Athlon processor and the 950 mhz Duron processor for everyday business and home computing. The company also announced its intention to target the Indian commercial market with two versions of its AMD ``Athlon MP'' chip for servers and workstations.

Talking to newsmen, company officials asserted that the Athlon and Duron chips scored over its bigger rival Intel's offerings by a wide margin. The chips are priced at $253 and $ 122, respectively, in 1,000 units quantities. It may be recalled that Intel, which is slightly fussy about price-elasticity, had dropped its rates about two weeks back.

Systems featuring AMD's newest processors are available from Compaq. AMD expects availability soon from Hewlett Packard, MicronPC and NEC-CI among others.

Making a frontal attack on similar products by Intel, a senior company official, Mr. Wee Yep Yin, said, ``at 1.4 ghz, the AMD Athlon processor with DDR memory continues to significantly outperform the competition as the most powerful PC platform in the world.''

AMD's 1.4 ghz Athlon chip outperforms Intel's 1.7 ghz Pentium processor based systems by up to 40 per cent on a variety of benchmarks including cutting-edge multimedia, desktop publishing, digital imaging and voice recognition applications.

The 950 mhz Duron processor too enjoyed a 30 per cent advantage over the rival Celeron processor by Intel, claimed officials.

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Section  : Business
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