by Omar Gallaga

The New York Times, in a blog post today, has done what tech industry analysts, two dominant companies in microprocessors and millions of customers could not: it ended the war of CPU speeds.

(Blogs that are dedicated to detailing the battle between Intel Corp. and its closest rival, AMD Inc. must be sad. I wonder if they will shut down and if they were taken by surprise at the news.)

For years, the two companies have introduced new processors in an ever-shifting race for PC brain dominance. These days, those speeds are measured in Gigahertz (it used to be Megahertz), but there are lots of other factors that determine PC performance. Nevertheless, fast CPU speeds have long been considered an important benchmark for computers. Until now.

The blog post reads in part:

AMD has more or less thrown in the towel on slugging it out with Intel on the mainstream chips, at least when it comes to talking directly with consumers. Now, the company's all about hawking the graphics chips it acquired when AMD purchased ATI... AMD executives contend that consumers care less about technical specs these days anyway. They're more interested in what a computer can actually do.

The blog post mentions AMD's recent "Vision" marketing efforts, which emphasize graphical muscle over the clock speeds of microprocessors. But if AMD's company strategy is a full retreat, it seems a bit strange that they've been trumpeting the speed of their processors every time one of them breaks a world speed record.

The last time I visited AMD's campus in the spring (they have a large facility here in Austin), I don't remember hearing anything about throwing in the towel to Intel. I'm sad that I missed it.

Could it be the white flag was waved on behalf of the company before AMD was ready? I didn't even know we in the media could do that.

If we have that much power, I think I'm going to gather all my strength and work on settling those cola wars next.

(Further reading: Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal weigh in on AMD's marketing strategy.)