Five hundred employees and guests crowded under a white tent half the length of a football field at Intel's Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters as Chief Executive Paul Otellini put his company's newest line of computer chips through their paces.
"These are the best microprocessors we've ever designed, the best microprocessors we've ever built," Otellini said. "This is not just incremental change; it's a revolutionary leap."
Otellini's pronouncement relegated to obsolescence Intel's Pentium chip, which once powered more than 80 percent of the world's personal computers. That wasn't the only surprise last July.
A camera zoomed in on engineers in lab coats in Haifa, Israel. The video revealed that the chip Intel is counting on to recover from a battering by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) wasn't invented in Silicon Valley. Instead, Intel is betting on a group of Israeli mavericks and a design bureau 7,400 miles away.
Shmuel Eden, former head of the Israel Development Center, where the new Core 2 Duo was created, says he's fed up with the perception that Intel's prowess is fading.
"People are angry," said Eden, who moved to Santa Clara in 2002 as sales manager for Intel's laptop chip division. "When I see something in the press saying Advanced Micro has taken our lead in technology, it hurts me personally."
Investors are hurting, too.
"I can't see Intel getting back to the market-share levels they used to have," said William Gorman, an analyst at Philadelphia-based PNC Wealth Management, which manages about $50 billion, including Intel shares. "They opened a window, and AMD took advantage."
Intel's share of the $33 billion computer-processor industry is the lowest in 11 years, according to Cave Creek, Ariz.-based Mercury Research. Profit plunged 42 percent to $5.04 billion last year as the company slashed prices after Intel's share of the personal-computer processor market slipped to 75 percent.
Advanced Micro, Intel's Sunnyvale, Calif.-based rival, unveiled its first server processor, called Opteron, in 2003. Since then, AMD has wrested customers away from Intel.
"These are the best microprocessors we've ever designed, the best microprocessors we've ever built," Otellini said. "This is not just incremental change; it's a revolutionary leap."
Otellini's pronouncement relegated to obsolescence Intel's Pentium chip, which once powered more than 80 percent of the world's personal computers. That wasn't the only surprise last July.
A camera zoomed in on engineers in lab coats in Haifa, Israel. The video revealed that the chip Intel is counting on to recover from a battering by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) wasn't invented in Silicon Valley. Instead, Intel is betting on a group of Israeli mavericks and a design bureau 7,400 miles away.
Shmuel Eden, former head of the Israel Development Center, where the new Core 2 Duo was created, says he's fed up with the perception that Intel's prowess is fading.
"People are angry," said Eden, who moved to Santa Clara in 2002 as sales manager for Intel's laptop chip division. "When I see something in the press saying Advanced Micro has taken our lead in technology, it hurts me personally."
Investors are hurting, too.
"I can't see Intel getting back to the market-share levels they used to have," said William Gorman, an analyst at Philadelphia-based PNC Wealth Management, which manages about $50 billion, including Intel shares. "They opened a window, and AMD took advantage."
Intel's share of the $33 billion computer-processor industry is the lowest in 11 years, according to Cave Creek, Ariz.-based Mercury Research. Profit plunged 42 percent to $5.04 billion last year as the company slashed prices after Intel's share of the personal-computer processor market slipped to 75 percent.
Advanced Micro, Intel's Sunnyvale, Calif.-based rival, unveiled its first server processor, called Opteron, in 2003. Since then, AMD has wrested customers away from Intel.
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