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The chip race is on — but who needs more speed?

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Oct. 1. October will see rival computer chipmakers Intel and AMD entering the next lap of their longstanding race to create the faster processor. But global sales figures seem to bear out the gut feeling that lay customers tired of upgrading all the time, are asking: who needs so much speed?

The AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) used a global telecast on Tuesday to take the next jump in the leapfrogging race between the two Silicon Valley-based companies: they entered two new products into the lists: the Athlon XP 2800+ and 2700+ which are expected to perform better than chips clocking 2.8 gigahertz — that's 2.8 billion times a second — and 2.7 GHz. They may not have long to bask in the glory: in a few weeks, Intel, say industry watchers, will unveil its own Pentium 4 clocking 3 GHZ.

At the product presentations in Bangalore and Delhi a few days ago, AMD's Country Manager Sanjeev Keskar announced that early in 2003, it would come out with new technology called ``Hammer'' that for the first time would bring the benefits of 64-bit processing to the mass consumer PC desktop. This means data is processed in larger chunks — 64 compared to today's standard 32 bit systems.

Intel launched its own 64-bit chip — Itanium — last year. But this is a pricey chip for high-end users and needs code to be rewritten from earlier legacy chips like Pentium. AMD promises that all programmes written for today's desktop PCs will run smoothly on the new Hammer-based 64 bit systems. And to take on Itanium, it will unveil another 64-bit chip to be called Opteron.

As the ding dong battle, between the chip makers continues, lay users are asking: do meghertz matter?

It is not just in India that users, who saved to buy that first home PC, are annoyed to find that their systems are proclaimed to be obsolete even before they are installed — because a faster chip in the series has been announced.

But a survey quoted by The New York Times today finds that the overwhelming majority of the world's 500 million PC owners (about 6.5 million in India) use their machines for email, Internet searches and personal correspondence — all of them applications that will run comfortably on machines powered by chips running at one tenth of today's top speeds.

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