AMD to sell chip with three electronics brains

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.N), coming off the heels of its biggest chip launch in years last week, said on Monday it will sell a chip with three electronic brains at the beginning of 2008.

The move by AMD, which until the middle of last year had a leg up on its far larger rival Intel Corp (INTC.O), could help it garner a bigger portion of the overall desktop personal computer market, the Sunnyvale, California, company said.

AMD and Intel currently sell processors with a single, double and quadruple, or quad, cores, the central computing engines found in computers. With AMD's Phenom triple-core chip, AMD hopes to speed the adoption of multi-core chips, since sales of PCs with quad-core chips have been lackluster.

In the second quarter of 2007, fewer than 2 percent of desktop PCs sold used quad-core processors, according to consultancy Mercury Research.

By regulating the speed at which each core operates, AMD could conceivably sell a triple-core chip that has higher performance metrics than one of its own quad-core chips, said Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood.

"If they can get three cores that are higher performing than a quad-core, that will be a really fascinating trade-off," Brookwood said.

But AMD would need to tread carefully in how it sells the chips to consumers, Brookwood said.

Both AMD and Intel sell single, dual- and quad-core chips to consumers in the desktop market, with different amounts of memory and varying performance metrics.

"The potential for confusion exists," Brookwood said.

AMD last week launched its quad-core Opteron chip, which had been code-named Barcelona and was about six months late to market. Barcelona boasts faster performance, is more energy efficient, and makes it easier to run multiple kinds of operating system software at the same time, a feature known as virtualization.

(Reporting by Duncan Martell)