APPLICATIONS

Endorsing the technology of one of Intel Corp.'s key rivals, Sandia National Laboratories and Cray Inc. plan to build a massive supercomputer (Red Storm) using a soon-to-be-introduced line of microprocessor chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The development project is a high-profile vote of confidence for AMD's new Opteron chip. It represents a missed opportunity for Intel, which has been targeting its new Itanium line at high-performance computing applications. It's another disappointment for Intel, which has had difficulty persuading server makers to use its Itanium 2 processor, rather than RISC chips from Sun Microsystems and IBM. AMD released preliminary test results last week for Opteron that show the chip exceeding Intel's latest Itanium 2 model on one of two widely-used speed measures. At Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo conference earlier this month, Intel CCEO Craig Barrett said that while Itanium 2 adoption has been slow, he expects the chip to start gaining traction in the market soon.