Intel Corp (INTC)

[wbmw]

Re: It's no secret that Intel's first MCM dual-core chip, Smithfield, was a day late and a dollar short

Smithfield was an underperformer, but as a design, Intel's engineering teams executed extraordinarily well. To understand this, you have to consider the start times for these projects. AMD started mentioning dual core ever since they launched the first Opteron in H1 2003, where they planned for an H2 2005 launch (though this was not stated at the time). Intel, however, had Tejas planned for 2005, and likely hadn't started Smithfield until the Tejas project was officially canned (internally, this must have been H1 2004).

So in one year, Intel managed to get a dual core to market, while AMD took several. In fact, in the last leg of the race, both Intel and AMD started pulling in schedules, managing to get both cores to launch within a week of one another in Q2 2005. That's record time for Intel as far as design cycles go.

Ever since then, Intel's schedules have been on or ahead of target. It's only now that the products are competitive that people are finally giving them credit for this.