The deal highlighted India's growing role in the design of high-end chips.

It was a high-end chip set designed to integrate the performance and features of the PDP-11/70 onto a handful of chips.

Meanwhile the high-end 620 chip, for moderately to massively parallel servers, is said to be being set for 64 bits with a special environment mode bit that can switch between 32- and 64-bit operation.

Advanced Micro, the second-largest maker of chips for desktop personal computers, behind Intel, said it would call its high-end mobile chip the Athlon 4.

"We have 4,700 employees there now in four factories, and we are even doing some high-end chip designing in Shannon with Irish engineers," he said.

Before August, the lack of a high-end chip had put Advanced Micro at the mercy of Intel's aggressive price cuts.

Since the design of such high-end chips nominally takes about five years to complete, to stay competitive a company has to fund at least two of these large design teams to release products at the rate of 2.5 years per product generation.

The company said it would call its high-end mobile chip the Athlon 4, a name that takes advantage of the branding strength of its rival, Intel, which makes the Pentium 4 chip.

Intel can still make respectable profit margins with lower-volume high-end chips for workstations, but Advanced Micro, which does not make a work station-class microprocessor, saw the average price for its processors drop to $78 during the quarter.

In microprocessors, graphics processors and other high-end chips, hotspots can occur as power densities vary significantly across a chip.