Counter-'tock:' AMD fires back at Intel with everything it's got

This may be it. If AMD has one trump card left in its deck, it could be the ability to deliver a system that balances attractive performance with a measurably lower price. Today at CES, AMD is making its one shot to win back the enthusiast.

In recent months, the general perception among knowledgeable system builders has been that Intel has taken back the performance crown in nearly all market categories, and is threatening to lock in on the two market segments AMD has historically championed: 1) the budget-conscious buyer, and 2) the system builder and enthusiast.

So in a bold step to recapture the hearts and minds of the second group, AMD today is doing something that four years ago it swore it wouldn't do: It's creating a preferred component set for desktop PC components that's much tighter than ever before, that's tied more closely with new ATI graphics components, and which promises stronger performance through stepped-up production and improved support. It's the successor to AMD's generally successful, though not chart-busting, quad-core Spider platform first unveiled in November 2007.

It's called Dragon, and no one at AMD is under any impression that the road ahead for it won't be the toughest yet.

"We have a lot of ground to make up in the enthusiast community with Dragon," admitted Simon Solotko, senior manager of AMD's desktop division, in an interview with Betanews. "I think that simply by really providing a really fantastic platform and correcting some of the challenges we had with Spider, we're going to get a tremendous boost in our overall value, and I think that enthusiasts will come to our solution in greater numbers than they had before."

Early last year, at the worst possible time for the company, an erratum in the production process stalled the rollout of AMD's quad-core Barcelona architecture processors, including its first generation Phenoms. By the time they were finally released, it was obvious that AMD was unwilling to risk testing the 3.0 GHz barrier, either with its quad-core Opterons in the server market or with Phenoms for the consumer desktop market. Last year, AMD had plans to sell the 2.3 GHz Phenom 9600 -- the high-end of its Spider platform -- for $283 in 1,000-unit quantities. Today, its average street price is about $115, according to Pricewatch CPU.

So in the meantime, the company found itself building triple-core processors, in a field that was still saturated with dual-cores on the value side and low-cost quad-cores on the performance side. It still plans to market Phenom X3s, but it finds itself making value propositions that sound ironically similar to Intel's back in 2004 and '05, at the time it tried to stall the onset of the multicore era with a stopgap innovation it called hyperthreading. AMD used to poke fun at hyperthreading, but now it knows how Intel felt.

Enter the Dragon. It's based on three components, at the center of which are AMD's new Phenom II X4 processors, which will not be afraid to test the 3.0 GHz barrier. Those will be coupled with AMD Radeon HD 4800 graphics cards, and AMD 7-series chipsets on the motherboard.

"It's a great breakthrough," Solotko told us, acknowledging the need to break that barrier. "But beyond that, we've got tremendous performance headroom...for extreme tuning."

"Headroom" is the watchword AMD is using very frequently with regard to Dragon. That refers to the speed the processor will run when it runs according to specification, versus the speed it can run when enthusiasts take advantage of Dragon's on-board overclocking tools. The Spider platform received rave reviews from folks who truly did appreciate the ease with which the Phenom 9600 and 9500 could be overclocked and performance-tested. But with spec speeds comparably crippled compared to Intel, that overclocking became necessary in order for Spider to compete.

As AMD's Solotko told us, Dragon has tweaked the tools AMD offered with Spider, including its OverDrive utility. And in essence, it's inviting customers to use OverDrive to throttle up at will. In other words, Dragon is designed to run at speeds it's designed not to run at.

"The way you evaluate a high-performance car or engine, in the enthusiast community, is by how well it performs under extreme conditions," remarked Solotko. "Extreme conditions today come under a number of classifications: First, there's conditions as indicated by overclocking -- an out-of-specification operation. And we're going to blow that out of the water. That's number one. We're running these processors [at speeds] that quad-core processors have never attained, and that is a tremendous story for that community, and it will make this processor fun and exciting for enthusiasts to tweak and to tune.

"Second," he continued, "they run the world's most advanced games at the world's most extreme settings. And in those environments, [Phenom II X4] is providing ample performance to provide the best possible experience, and frame rates that are equivalent to or potentially even better than the best and most expensive processor from our competitor. So I don't know how else you win the trust of the enthusiast community, save by essentially going to the max in the extreme conditions and providing great performance and great headroom, and that's what this platform's going to provide. I think that we will work to earn that trust of that community, and I think we've got the parts to back it up."

Next: Betting everything on bettering the bottom line...