IBM, AMD Plan Assault on Intel's Chip Dominance

Few companies enjoy the kind of dominance Intel Corp. INTC 0.11 % does in chips for the computers found in data centers. But competitors keep trying to pry open its server stronghold, with International Business Machines Corp. IBM, at a Silicon Valley technical conference on Tuesday, plans to reveal new details of Power9, the next addition to the line of microprocessors the technology giant uses in its own servers and--in a recent strategy shift--offers to other hardware companies. Advanced Micro Devices Inc., AMD 1.19 % meanwhile, is using the same event to discuss the inner workings of processor technology called Zen that it plans to use in chips targeting servers and other hardware. AMD, which uses the same x86 design as Intel, last week at a company event demonstrated a chip using Zen processor cores outpacing its larger rival's chips in one speed test. "We had let our performance slip versus the competition," said Mark Papermaster, AMD's senior vice president and chief technology officer.