The corporate push will take place both in the United States and overseas. The company has visited more than 800 large corporations in the past year to discuss its technology and to try to erode the historical barriers against it, Herb said. AMD will also make a concerted effort to move into China. Opteron, a version of Hammer for servers, will debut with about 2GHz and will be marketed with a performance rating in the mid-3,000s, said Dirk Meyer, senior vice president of the computational products group. By the end of the year, the performance rating will go to the 4,000 level. The numbers represent the overall performance the chips exhibit and generally correspond to the megahertz of Intel's chips. The desktop version of Hammer, meanwhile, will come out in the first quarter. Like Intel, AMD will begin to try to establish tighter links with computer makers, coining reference designs and contributing more technology to the construction of computers, Ruiz said. Intel, for instance, designed and manufactured many of the first Itanium servers. Additionally, AMD will continue to try to expand its market share in flash memory. Before this year, the company largely sold its flash memory within the networking market. In 2002, though, it began to shift more emphasis onto the cellular market and since then has been able to take market share away from Intel, according to Herb. AMD landed a contract this week from an unidentified cell phone maker to supply flash memory to one of its high-end phones, Herb said. The contract earlier belonged to Intel, he added. Six of the top 10 cell phone makers in China now use AMD flash, said Bertrand Cambou, vice president of the flash group. The flash market is expected to grow by 35 percent next year, and the company says its flash memory output will grow even faster. Of course, these ambitious plans come at a time when the company has been losing market share, reporting huge financial losses and experiencing product delays. Still, the Hammer chip could help it recover. "If they can get Opteron out and if they can solidify their balance sheet, they will be with us for a while," said John Joseph, an analyst with Salomon Smith Barney.
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