AMD seeks server rebound with Barcelona
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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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AMD is releasing nine versions of its new Quad-Core Opteron server chip, code-named Barcelona.
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What may be the world's largest supercomputer is being built at the Texas Advanced Computing Center with AMD's Barcelona chips.
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Barcelona is a new CPU, not a doubling of cores and not extensions strapped on here and there, says InfoWorld's Tom Yager.
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If you pay, you can fill our slot AMD has expanded its friends and family program in an obvious way by allowing partners to plug their CPUs, accelerators and other components directly into Opteron processor sockets. AMD's unveiling today of Torrenza 2 - aka the Torrenza Innovation Socket - builds on an existing deal that let third parties tap into the company's Hypertransport technology. Now, AMD has agreed to open up the entire Opteron socket specifications to preferred partners willing to pay a licensing fee. As a result, customers could start seeing some odd but fantastic motherboards with, for example, a mix of Opteron and Cell chips or even an UltraSPARC T1/Opteron combo.â¦
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Hits stores in September Barcelona has arrived, sort of, and AMD is talking more about beating itself up than knocking Intel with the new chip.â¦
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Upgrade to high-performance server will include AMD's dual-core chip.
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InfoWorld - Newly released processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel will reinvigorate the market for high-end servers, according to one server analyst.
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AMD has delayed general availability of some key products until early next year, when it projects the chips, along with other new processors, will return it to profitability.The biggest hit went to its quad-core microprocessor, code-named Barcelona, which it needs to compete against Intel among server vendors. The chips, along with AMD&#39;s desktop platform, Phenom, won&#39;t be generally available to customers until the first quarter of next year. The products were supposed to ship in volume by the end of this year, but&#160;a technical design error in the chips caused AMD to slow the schedule so it could apply a fix, said Dirk Meyer, the company&#39;s president and COO in a meeting with analysts on Thursday.The company&#39;s Puma platform, a set of chips aimed at laptop PCs, will also be delayed until the second quarter of next year, a costly miss considering the fact that the laptop PC market is growing at around 30 percent per year.AMD also reduced its planned spending on new production lines to $1.1 billion from a previous estimate of $1.7 billion and said all its business divisions wouldn&#39;t return to profitability until next year.The statements caused AMD&#39;s stock to fall as much as 5 percent during early trading on the New York Stock Exchange, before rebounding to down just 1.8 percent, at $8.81 in the afternoon. The market was still open as of this writing.AMD executives apologized for missteps, such as the delay in Barcelona.&quot;We blew it, we&#39;re very humbled by it, we learned from it, and we&#39;re not going to do it again,&quot; said Hector Ruiz, chairman and CEO of AMD. He said AMD would go back to its habit of under-promising and over-delivering.To start, the company will be on a path to break even financially by the second quarter of next year and return to profitability by the end of the third quarter, he said. The financial performance will be boosted by the launch of several new products in graphics, chipsets, digital TV processors, and more, not including the delayed products.The company forecast its processor shipments will rise at least 15 percent next year, while graphics processor shipment growth will be greater than 6 percent, digital TV processors more than 13 percent, and handheld chips up 8 percent.AMD&#39;s gross margin will rise to between 46 percent and 50 percent next year, up from 37 percent during the past four quarters, said Bob Rivet, chief financial officer of AMD.&quot;We&#8217;re in a massive product refresh. In 2007, we were living on some old stuff. 2008 is all new stuff, and we believe it will yield goodness,&quot; he said.
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Multithread frenzy takes another step at Sun: "Victoria Falls" chip will mean 128 threads in a single server.Video: Sun CEO looks to future
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High-end processors for computer servers will compete with an upcoming new product from AMD.
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Launch of high-performance Constellation system depends on delivery of quad-core 'Barcelona.'
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CEO still eyeing AMD. Also: Server maker unsheathes new blades and a software pact with Microsoft.
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Like a boxer recovering from several body blows, AMD has thrown a punch back at its opponent, Intel. But will AMD&#39;s first quad-core server chip, the new Opteron, help turn things around for the beleaguered chipmaker?
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SAN FRANCISCO - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) plans to build security and virtualization features into its server processors by 2006, the company said Friday during its annual analyst event.
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After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.&#39;s latest processor, a quad-core server chip called Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the market Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will miss its revenue goal for the first quarter of 2007 because the chip maker grew so fast that it couldn't keep up with demand from its customers, company CEO Hector Ruiz said Monday. The company is unlikely to meet its estimated revenue target of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion for the quarter, the company said. For the same period last year, AMD brought in $1.33 billion, or $780 million excluding revenue from its Spansion memory products unit, which AMD spun off in an IPO (initial public offering) in December 2005. Although the company has gained market share for 10 consecutive quarters -- principally from rival Intel -- that trend is both good news and bad news, Ruiz told an audience of financial investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. "We went from being a player whose majority of sales were in the distribution channel as opposed to OEMs, to one that has changed in a very short time to having a majority of sales going to OEM buyers," he said in a reference to original equipment manufacturers. That transition happened probably faster than we had planned. A larger number of OEMs wanted our products faster than we were prepared to meet, so we were not able to feed the channel." Despite AMD's success in gaining market share, even Ruiz admitted that it may be too late to retain some disgruntled customers. "A channel partner needs a commitment for a 30- to 60-day supply of products. I couldn't give it to them, so they decided to get it somewhere else. We let down our channel partners by not being able to support them as much as they needed us. We need to get our distribution business back on track." Ruiz was contrite about the "glitch," but promised the company would quickly spring back by increasing production, particularly of its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron chip due out in the second half of 2007. The chip will compete against Intel's "Clovertown" quad-core Xeon chip, which launched at the end of 2006. AMD has been aggressive in boosting its market share in the processor industry to nearly 25 percent and by acquiring graphics chip maker ATI in 2006. But investors have begun to grow wary since the company has not yet been able to turn those moves into profits. AMD posted a loss of $574 million in its fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, 2006.