AMD CEO Hector Ruiz said in an interview that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company was prepared to announce key customers for Opteron, its line of more data-intensive chips due in April that is AMD's biggest new product in four years.
"We are working with all of the top five" computer makers, Ruiz said, referring to the preliminary testing and evaluation period that normally precedes the decision by any computer maker to build machines based on a new chip.
Ruiz made the comments at the sidelines of a conference of technology leaders held ahead of the opening of CeBit, the annual tech extravaganza held in Hannover, Germany.
An AMD representative said the company would not name computer maker customers until April, but it hoped that at least one major PC maker would be ready to build Opteron-based PCs by the April 22 launch date, with others to follow.
"I believe we will be able to give some very specific names" at the April 22 launch, Ruiz said of the computer makers that will use AMD's chips to build server PCs, the computers used to manage business operations.
Ruiz cautioned, however, that war fears appear to have put corporate-buying decisions on hold.
AMD is the world's second-largest maker of microprocessors, the chips used to power PCs, behind archrival Intel. AMD is looking to its new family of Hammer chips due out over the course of this year to make inroads against Intel in the market for big business computers, commercial PCs and mobile PCs.
"We believe that this will be a very interesting year for us...This is a year of change. We are going to be in transition," Ruiz said of the cycle of product introductions that he believes can push AMD back into profitability by the end of 2003. The recovery would follow a year of restructuring in which the company cut its work force by 15 percent.
AMD is seeking to emerge from a period of restructuring and falling market share against Intel with its new line of chips designed to simultaneously process 64 bits of data, twice the rate of older 32-bit chips upon which most PCs are based.
Ruiz said has seen no sign yet of the long-awaited corporate PC replacement cycle that analysts say could come as early as midyear as companies move to upgrade aging stocks of office computers, many of which are as much as five years old.
If this were a normal economic cycle, PC upgrades would pick up steam as the economy recovers. But this time the cyclical purchasing cycle for new computers will depend on a quick resolution of the looming war in Iraq, he said.
"I believe that it is very possible that if there is a nondisruptive end to the war during the second quarter, we could see a very healthy cycle begin," he said.
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