Intel Corporation (INTC): Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD)’s Attention to the Channel Works in India

Moreover, it is ultimately a matter of cost per unit performance per watt. As the early benchmarks on the new Calxeda micro-servers show, lots of tiny cores doing individual specific tasks is superior under heavy load than fewer big cores running multiple operations at once. Both Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) and AMD have their work cut out for them in this area as neither the current nor upcoming Atom cores from Intel nor AMD’s Jaguar cores were designed for this type of micro-server environment. Until we see some silicon and real-world benchmarking it should be assumed that as the ARM-based Calxeda (and its imitators) matures through its planned evolutionary path it is the prototype of the future cloud server.

Lastly, there is little that Intel can offer at a similar price to performance point with either its current Ivy Bridge or upcoming Haswell chips that can compete with the value proposition offered by the recently released Richland APUs, which will be a zero design cost upgrade over Trinity and offer significantly more performance and much better power management. I’m also very bullish on the Jaguar core-based Kabini and Temash APUs, which will truly open up Windows 8’s capabilities in a tablet form factor. There is nothing on the market that will compete with Temash for at least a year, and it stands to reason that the seeds planted by AMD India at the enterprise level will not bear fruit at the end user level.