Analysts say AMD's success with Opteron will help ensure competitive pricing and accelerate the pace of innovation in the chip market. How do you stay competitive with Intel on technology? First of all, we're a really focused company, and we made a decision to throw all our energy into x86. There is no other company in the world doing that. We also made a decision a few years back that intimacy with customers was going to be critical to us for leveraging R&D effectively. We couldn't afford to kind of play around and hope we could cram down the customers' throats our great ideas. I think that is the answer to how we can compete with 10% of the money that our competitor has.
The other side of that [question] -- will it lead to innovation? I think having two strong companies competing will lead to significantly better innovation. Intel has announced some improved products [that are expected] later on this year. Frankly, I believe they would not be doing that if we had not been as successful.
How far can multicore development reasonably go on the x86 platform? Quadcore chips are expected, and eight-core ones later on. It really will be driven by what the customers will benefit from. We're going to demonstrate, along with our competitors, that four cores is a done deal and eight cores is not a technology challenge. Technically speaking, frankly, I don't see why you couldn't put 100 cores on a chip.
Power consumption is becoming a huge issue in data centers. At some point, do you see users making trade-offs between the performance and power consumption of microprocessors? I most definitely do. People are going to want to optimize the balance between performance and power consumption, so I think performance per watt will become a much more meaningful metric than just raw performance or one-core power consumption alone.
Do you see virtualization as a potential threat to how you differentiate your products? I see virtualization as a great opportunity for us as well as for the customers. Today, when we have the possibility of putting in the data center or in the back office this huge capability on clusters of computing power, and at very low cost and very low energy consumption, then it really opens up the possibility -- because of virtualization -- to have a much more intelligent deployment of clients that will also optimize performance per watt. Because of the more centralized nature of that approach, you can have much better control over cost, security and a number of other things.