Intel has four-core Opteron stuffer set for August
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Barcelona: 'It could have been a contender' Exclusive Intel looks set to blunt AMD's August Barcelona processor release by handing customers a 2.0GHz version of its four-core Clovertown, The Register has learned.â¦
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IDF Fall '04 As Intel prepares to detail its own multi-core chips
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) said Friday it wouldÂ begin shipping its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processorÂ in August, rebutting industry rumors that the chip faced manufacturing problems that could delay it until October. Although AMD has already lined up hardware partners like Sun MicrosystemsÂ to use the chip in high-end servers, some analysts had predicted that a delayed release could cause AMD toÂ lose business to Intel. However, AMD insists it is on schedule to produce both standard and low-wattage SE (special edition) versions of Barcelona, in a range of frequencies up to 2.0GHz. The new Barcelona chips will generate the same amount of heat as current Opteron chips, but improve computing performance by 70 percent for database applications or 40 percent for floating point jobs, Allen said. Future versions of both types will run at even higher speeds, allowing customers to further improve their energy efficiency, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server and workstation division. Intel competes for those same customers today with the dual-core Woodcrest and quad-core Clovertown Xeon processorsÂ launched last year, and plans to up the ante in the fourth quarter of 2007 with quad-core "Harpertown" server chip using smaller, 45-nanometer scale components. AMD will begin shipping Barcelona chips for sale in August, and expects server vendors to ship commercial products using the chip by September. AMD hopes those new servers are popular enough to help reverse a slide in market share and revenue in recent months. The company has posted losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for the past two quarters as it struggles to survive aÂ price war with Intel. Â
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Company will break its promise to deliver a speedier chip, shifts focus to dual-core designs. Intel has confirmed its near-term plans for its desktop processors before it reaches the multicore era.
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Chop, chop AMD has followed up last week's Opteron price cuts with a round of reductions applied to its Athlon-brand processors. The latest cuts affect both single- and dual-core versions of the 64-bit CPU family.â¦
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Computers built with Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor soon will be able to take advantage of the same power management technology the company has already built into its laptop and desktop microchips.
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Blog: Next week will see the arrival of new Intel chips for servers with four or more processors, as the chipmaker finally moves past the old Netburst architecture.
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Computers with AMD&#39;s Opteron processor will soon be able to take advantage of the same power management technology the company has already built into its laptop and desktop microchips.
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Upcoming chip set will support 802.11a, b, and g networks.
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AMD's Quad FX Platform aimed at gamers, multitaskers -- and Intel's quad-core designs.
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AMD has raised the stakes with Intel as the pair prepare to do battle over dual-core processors following last week&#39;s demonstration of a dual-core x86 Opteron.
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(InfoWorld) - AMD hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market fromÂ its rival IntelÂ on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor. AMD has been shipping the Quad-Core AMD Opteron chip to server vendors throughout August but will use its news conference in San Francisco to publicly announce those partnerships as well as prices and benchmark test results. The company plans to launch a 1.9GHz, 68-watt Barcelona chip that focuses on power efficiency, and a 2.0GHz, 95-watt version that focuses on price/performance, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for the server and workstation division. In the fourth quarter, the company will follow that with a 2.3 GHz, 120-watt version for high-performance applications, and higher clock speeds for the first two chips. There is a lot at stake. After launching the original Opteron chip in 2003, the company enjoyed brisk demand as customers applauded the power-efficient performance of that 130-nanometer design process chip. But Intel soon got back in the fight as both companies built smaller, faster components, shrinking their chip scales to 90nm and adding a second core. AMD has endured disappointing results lately,Â posting losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for recent quartersÂ and focusing its attention onÂ a merger with graphics chip maker ATI. At the same time, Intel claimed bragging rights to beating AMD to quad-core architecture andÂ 65nm scale chips with its ClovertownÂ server chip.Â Intel is also preparing to launch an even smaller-featured design in the fourth quarter with its 45nm Penryn chip. AMD says Barcelona is the answer to the Intel challenge. The chip is designed with all four cores on a single die as opposed to Intel's design of joining two dual-core Woodcrest Xeon chips, Allen said. Even more important, AMD upgraded each core from 64-bit floating point performance to 128-bit and retained its Direct Connect architecture and on-chip memory controller to avoid bottlenecks in data flow, he said. Thanks to that design, the new chip will provide better performance while using the same amount of power, he said. A customer could upgrade a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL 385 server from AMD's dual-core to quad-core Opteron and gain faster operation with the same power and cooling demands. "Clovertown will look very anemic, especially as we bring out new frequencies. Customers really don't buy nanometers. What they care about is performance and benchmarking," said Allen. "That Direct Connect architecture is very helpful with virtualization, running multiple OSes, and other applications pulling more data than can be held in on-chip memory." Despite those advantages, AMD has missed out on a spike in market demand driven by a need to upgrade to servers capable of performing virtualization, one analyst said. "A lot of people view this as six months late or more," said Doug Freedman, managing director for research at American Technology Research. "Expectations got ahead of themselves, and some people viewed this as a potential savior for AMD after their server share topped out at the end of last year going up against Intel's dual-die quad-core. Now the feeling is this launch isn't robust enough in terms of samples shipped, design wins, and the complete food chain." To recover, AMD will have to quickly increase its production and release faster versions of Barcelona to improve the chip's availability for a range of applications, Freedman said. Intel executives say they are pressing the lead. "We are very confident, at least on the DP [dual processor] side, that we will have leadership across most of the benchmarks versus Barcelona," said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group. "There are a small percentage of benchmarks which are floating-point based where we know that they have an advantage and that's an area which we will see them talk about a lot.... If you look at the broader spectrum of applications at the enterprise, we have a significant lead today, and we believe we will have that lead with Clovertown, and once we have Harpertown with 45nm we will extend that lead further," Gupta said. However, some vendors say there is room in the market for both chips. Each processor has its own strengths, said Dell CEO Michael Dell in remarks to financial analysts at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York on Wednesday. Based on early tests, Dell said, a server using Barcelona chips is faster at running floating-point applications than a computer with Intel's Clovertown chips, but Clovertown is faster than Barcelona at running integer instructions. "So depending on the applications you run, or your theories of computer science, one of those servers may be the best for you. It is simply unacceptable for a company of Dell's size to have only one of those choices," Dell said.
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Chip maker offers few details about its plans for dual-core server processors.
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Intel Corp. , the world's  biggest microchip company, will launch chips with four  processing cores in November, Chief Executive Paul Otellini  said on Tuesday.
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Though about the same size, the forthcoming dual-core Opteron will be up to 55 percent faster than today's single-core chips, AMD says.
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Opteron to gain power preservation tech - and other goodies
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SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA - Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) dual-core Opteron processor will fit into the same area occupied by its single-core product, helping to hold down manufacturing costs, AMD said Tuesday at the Fall Processor Forum.