AMD turns to Chartered for help
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The Intel rival known for its Athlon PC and Opteron server processors announced on Tuesday plans to tap Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, a contract manufacturer, for extra chip-production capacity.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) isÂ getting ready to launch Barcelona, its first quad-core server chip. A successful Barcelona launch, expected to happen during the third quarter, is critical for AMD, which has seen itsÂ share of the server market batteredÂ in recent quarters by Intel. Those market-share losses came with a heavy price, dragging AMD's finances into the red. In April, the company announcedÂ a $611 million loss, largely attributed to tougher competition and aÂ price war with Intel. To stem these losses, AMD has cut discretionary spending but executives are counting on Barcelona to restore its financial health and turn the tables on its archrival. Kevin Knox, the vice president of AMD's commercial business, recently sat down with IDG News Service to discuss preparations for Barcelona's upcoming launch. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation. IDGNS: Where do things currently stand with Barcelona? Kevin Knox: We're still on target for a mid-year launch with Barcelona. We're actually pretty excited about the product, particularly with respect to some of the features that we're going to enable. When we started out with Barcelona it had a certain feature set. From the time we started out, from the design perspective, the aspects we're going to address, things like virtualization and power, have become more important to the industry. We think its going to have a bigger impact than we originally anticipated. IDGNS: Is Barcelona going to reverse AMD's recent losses in server market share? Knox: I firmly believe it will. A lot of that has to do with this not being just a speed upgrade. If it was just a speed upgrade, it's a lot more challenging at any point in time to get an advantage and maintain that advantage. Barcelona is not just a quad-core chip, it's more than quad core. We've made fundamental, significant changes to the architecture as part of the chip. We looked at the overall design, at the cache and the pipelines, so it's a lot more than just taking two dual-core chips and saying it's quad core. It's a true, native quad-core design with enhancements at the processor level. IDGNS: How do you view comparisons between Barcelona and Intel's quad-core server chips? Knox: If you look at the two products, they're very different products. If you go back many years, when we designed Opteron, Opteron was designed for multi-chip, multi-core environments. When we went from single core to dual core, it wasn't a big thing for us. When we went from dual core to quad core, the reason this has taken a little longer is we made some enhancements to the core, not because going to four cores was the major challenge. What we've focused on is doing enhancements to the core and doing virtualization. This is probably a larger and more important launch than you've seen in the past. There's a lot riding on the ecosystem, the ISVs, and hardware vendors, to make sure we have all the pieces in a line so when we do launch we can have pretty quick uptake. IDGNS: How much work has been done to seed the market for Barcelona? Has AMD shipped sample systems to major customers so they can test their applications? Knox: Yes, we're starting to get some samples to customers as seeds. You definitely need to have seed programs. They're critical. People want to kick the tires, especially with something as significant as the move from dual core to quad core, and the enhancements we've made. We're going to have a larger seed program than we've ever had before on the server side. Part of that's because there's some new stuff, and part of that's because it's a pretty competitive market right now. Frankly, there are some accounts you have to seed. Whenever new technology comes out, you've got to let the Wall Street guys try it out. And it's not just the end-user community. There's a whole ISV aspect to it, as well. They've got to get ready. You've got to get the hardware manufacturers in Taiwan ready. IDGNS: What does the launch of Barcelona mean? When the launch happens next quarter, will the chips be widely available in large quantities? Knox: That's what we're going through now. Our plan is not to have a paper launch. We want to do a launch with a product. IDGNS: With large numbers of Barcelona servers available for sale? Knox: Right. And given what's been going on in the market, it's extremely critical that people understand that. We have had a number of launches in the past, I'll point to Intel's Clovertown launch as an example. They launched Clovertown and I think it was less than 10 percent of their product mix two quarters later. That says to me it wasn't really a quick ramp, product wasn't readily available. Our goal here is to get Barcelona out, and get it into the market as quickly as possible.
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Amid further delays of AMD&#39;s quad-core server chip and plans to write off goodwill from the acquisition of ATI, AMD executives are going to face tough questions when they meet financial analysts in New York Thursday.
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Finances Nivio R&amp;D Chip maker AMD will pump an undisclosed stack of cash into research and development funds for virtualisation solutions provider Nivio.â¦
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As this year comes to a close, AMD executives won&#39;t be sorry to put 2007 behind them. Battered by rising debt, shrinking market share and mounting financial losses, AMD is counting on a comeback in 2008. But can the struggling chip maker make good on its promises to customers and investors that better times lie ahead?Many of AMD&#39;s current troubles are tied to Barcelona, the first version of its Quad-Core Opteron processor.&#160;Repeated delays of this chip weakened AMD&#39;s finances and undermined confidence in the company&#39;s ability to deliver new products as promised. Rebuilding that lost confidence among corporate users and the financial community won&#39;t be easy and the company can ill afford further missteps.Over the next six months, there are several milestones that AMD must hit in order to get back on track. The first, and arguably most important, involves volume shipments of Barcelona, scheduled to happen during the first quarter. AMD desperately needs this chip to shore up flagging revenue from its commercial business and to take back ground lost recently to Intel in the server market.With a bug that was recently discovered in Barcelona fixed, AMD expects the latest version of the chip to start coming out of its manufacturing plants in January. Barcelona shipments are expected to rise throughout the first quarter, reaching &quot;full volumes&quot; and widespread availability of servers based on the chip during the second quarter, according to Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman.Another early milestone to look out for involves Shanghai, the second version of the Quad-Core Opteron chip that&#39;s set for volume production during the second half of 2008. AMD will produce Shanghai with a 45-nanometer manufacturing process that is one generation ahead of the 65-nanometer process used to make Barcelona.The numbers used to describe chip manufacturing processes refer to the average size of the smallest features that can be created on a chip. The smaller these features can be made, the better. Making these features smaller gives chip makers the ability to shrink the overall size of a chip, thereby reducing unit manufacturing costs, or to add new features. Chips made using a more advanced process may also consume less power and run faster than other versions. But semiconductor production is as much art as it is science, and moving to a more advanced process is fraught with risks.In the case of Shanghai, AMD will take advantage of the 45-nanometer process to triple the size of the Level 3 (L3) cache, from 2M bytes in Barcelona to 6M bytes. The L3 cache is a shared pool of memory that can be accessed by all four cores on the chip. Each core has 512K bytes of Level 2 (L2) cache. When data is moved out of the L2 cache, it moves into the L3 cache instead of main memory, meaning that the core can access this information more quickly than would otherwise be possible.Like AMD&#39;s existing server lineup, Barcelona and Shanghai also include an on-chip memory controller that further helps to increase performance.The memory structure used in the Quad-Core Opteron is different from Intel&#39;s server chips, which do not use an L3 cache and do not have an on-chip memory controller. Instead, Intel&#39;s quad-core Xeon 7300 server chips have 8M bytes of shared L2 cache. Since Intel processors actually pack two dual-core chips inside a single package, the L2 cache is divided into two parts, with 4M bytes on each silicon chip. Intel&#39;s processors do not use an on-chip memory controller.Boosting the Quad-Core Opteron&#39;s L3 cache with Shanghai should give AMD&#39;s quad-core chips the opportunity to stretch their legs, but the company has to make them first. The first working samples of Shanghai are due out of AMD&#39;s factory in Dresden, Germany, in January, according to recent remarks by Mario Rivas, executive vice president of AMD&#39;s Computing Products Group. If these samples arrive late or suffer from unexpected technical problems, this could delay volume production of Shanghai to late 2008 or even early 2009. Conversely, working samples that arrive on schedule and meet or exceed expectations would give AMD an added boost.Besides the server segment, there are a couple of key product milestones on AMD&#39;s roadmap for desktop and mobile processors that bear watching as well.For example, the company plans a first-quarter rollout of Perseus, a package of chips aimed at PCs for the corporate market and centered on a quad-core or triple-core processor and an RS780 or SB700 chipset. A dual-core version will also be rolled out. During the second quarter, AMD plans to roll out Puma, a chip package designed for notebooks. Puma is based on a new processor, called Griffin, expected to offer better performance and power efficiency than AMD&#39;s existing line of mobile processors.AMD plans to offer additional details of its plans and upcoming products at the Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas during January, Hughes said.
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I guess this news will have to hold us over until the individual companies make their announcements. AMD today announced PCI Express support from leading chipset manufacturers, offering performance-hungry
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MOP to the rescue HP has located a few friends, including Intel and AMD, to help it deal with the multi-core processor morass.â¦
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Race for bragging rights favors Intel again -- for now. But AMD is fighting back with a workaround it says will keep  it in the running until it can bring out its own quad core. By Dan Goodin.
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AMD is to outsource AMD64 processor production - or at least a portion of it - the chip maker announced today. The move is one part of a larger deal struck with Singapore&#39;s Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing
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Chartered Semiconductor's process validated, sources claim Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor looks set to continue its foundry partnership with AMD into the 65nm era, if industry-insider claims that the chip maker has validated Chartered's 65nm production facility.â¦
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Intel-based PCs are shipping now and AMD systems with the technology are on the way.
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Firm may be facing greater difficulties than previously thought in getting hold of chips to power its high-end PCs.
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) said Wednesday it has gained approval from key U.S., Canadian, and German antitrust regulators for itsÂ $5.4 billion plan to buyÂ Canadian chip set developer ATI Technologies.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has begun shipping commercial versions of its Athlon 64 processors made using a 90-nanometer process, marking another step forward in the company's transition to the more advanced manufacturing technology.
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Burned by a series of production missteps and canceled products, the company lets AMD get out in front on multicore product announcements.
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Now that Intel and Microsoft have finally caught up with AMD, the next computing era can begin.
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'Niagara' UltraSparc CPU piques interest among new customers with trial program, open source support.