The US microprocessor maker AMD aims to break the monopoly of its arch-rival Intel within five years and hopes China will become one of the first markets for this to happen, said top company officials.

"The market environment has become more open and fair and there is no reason why Intel should maintain its monopoly," said Hector Ruiz, chairman, president and CEO of the Sunnyvale, California-based US central processing unit (CPU) maker, in an interview in Shanghai on Tuesday.

"The desires of customers, especially in China, are to have two strong competitors in the market," he added.

He believed his company will achieve faster growth in the Chinese market than AMD's home market, where its competitor still has a "monopolistic position."

AMD saw its business in China grow by 150 percent last year with increasing recognition from the PC industry.

Last year, AMD had less than 20 percent of the domestic market share, roughly the same as the world's average, according to Dirk Meyer, executive vice-president for computing with AMD.

However, Ruiz believed his company should raise this figure to 50 percent.

"We hope to see significant penetration in the Chinese market," he said.

Meyer also said in an interview yesterday that AMD should be able to take 30 percent of the total microprocessor market in terms of revenues within five years in China and throughout the world.

Ruiz said that after making significant progress in the consumer PC market, AMD will put more focus on the commercial computing sector.

Last year, US giant HP and the Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group, the parent company of the second largest domestic computer maker Founder Group, joined the AMD camp, in what was a major breakthrough for the US CPU maker.

Both Ruiz and Meyer believed another computer giant Dell, the only international player focusing solely on the Intel platform, will begin to use AMD processors in the future.

Dell adopted AMD's opteron processors two years ago.

"We have high hopes that Dell will take on our other products to meet their customers' needs," said Ruiz.

To add weight to its lofty goals, AMD will launch its dual-core processors, which, in theory, double computing performance, in the second quarter.

Meyer said his company will launch products for computer servers in the next quarter and then expand to notebook and desktop computers in the second half.

AMD also opened its first microprocessor test, mark and pack (TMP) facility in China - AMD Technologies China Co Ltd - yesterday in Suzhou of East China's Jiangsu Province.

The US CPU maker is expected to invest US$100 million in total in the plant.

The TMP plant will test and pack AMD's K7 processors at the current stage, and it will also handle the company's K8 processors, known as Athlon.

Chuck Anderson, vice-president of the manufacturing services division of AMD's computation group, said the production capacity of the Suzhou plant is about 10 percent of AMD's test and assembly facility in Singapore, but this figure will double this year and double again in three years.

He added the increase does not mean a reduction of its production in Singapore, but is mainly driven by market demand.

(China Daily March 3, 2005)