Intel's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, has admitted it was the company's own fault that upstart rival AMD was able to release a number of key technologies ahead of it in the last two years.

"I think we got ourselves into a position with the Pentium 4 micro-architecture where we just tried to stretch it beyond what was a reasonable point," said Mr Rattner. "In some sense we didn't heed our own warnings."

Mr Rattner made the comments yesterday at the opening of the Innovation Value Institute, a research and education centre in NUI Maynooth which will look at how businesses can get more value out of their investments in information technology.

Intel employs 5,500 people at its nearby Leixlip, Co Kildare, manufacturing facility.

While Mr Rattner conceded that Intel had given an opportunity to its arch-rival, he said the decision at the same time to invest in its Centrino platform for laptop computers had paid dividends.

Mr Rattner also told The Irish Times that he believed Moore's Law would hold true for at least the next ten years. Formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the mid-60s, the law states that processing power of computer chips doubles every 24 months while costs stay the same.

"Moore's Law in a strict sense is not coming to an end any time soon," said Mr Rattner. "We can still see our way out three or four generations and we've never really done any better than that. If you had asked Gordon Moore in 1976, 'how long do you think this is going to continue?', he probably would have said at least 10 years, because that is all he had visibility into and it's still the same today."

Mr Rattner said introducing new materials into the manufacturing process was the biggest challenge facing the production of newer chips, which have more transistors in a smaller area.