On December 6 at the Ritz-Calton hotel in Singapore, the media and AMD staff gathered to await the arrival of Intel to the former's dual-core processor challange. It was fortunate that none of us held our breaths in anticipation, else the hotel would have had a logistical nightmare carting the limp bodies of out-of-breath journalists off its grounds.
Did we really expect Intel to show up? If we step back a couple of years, Intel would have mobilized its entire office, including the pantry lady, to crush AMD with an advertising budget equal to the GDP of a third-world country even before the latter had time to kiss its posterior goodbye. But with an overwhelming market share in processors and a finger in almost every hardware-related pie, from flash memory to notebook manufacture, we get the impression that Intel views AMD's provocation like a mouse threatening to beat up an elephant.
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