Pre-AMD, ATI preps novel server charge
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GPGPU for U and me Even before its merger with AMD closes, ATI plans to charge the server market with a new type of graphics product that could shake up the high performance computing market. Advocates of ATI's technology say it could create a lucrative new revenue stream for the company and add some weight to the ATI/AMD marriage.â¦
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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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Eyeing Sun's Niagara flow Intel has confirmed plans to "tick" and "tock" AMD into submission.â¦
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TechWeb - The processor&#39;s sweet spot will be in four-way servers, and midrange two-way servers, but AMD will need to show increased performance for the price if it wants to add customers, analysts suggest.
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AMD uses a technology called PowerNow to control power supply to the processor depending upon how much of the processing power is being used.
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Dell may begin to use AMD chips in some of its servers according to the company&#39;s Chief Executive Kevin Rollins. The revelation was made in conference call to analysts to discuss the company&#39;s Q3 earnings.
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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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The quad-core server chip won't appear until later this year, but AMD's trying to show potential customers the chips are up and running.
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(InfoWorld) - Some of the first servers based on Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD's) upcoming Barcelona quad-core chip areÂ on display at Computex, but details of the chips are being kept tightly under wraps. Supermicro Computer, Tyan Computer, and Uniwide TechnologiesÂ are all showing Barcelona systems this week in Taipei, but the companies and AMD are not revealing details about what's inside. At Supermicro's booth, the company had a two-way Barcelona server, which was housed inside a nondescript beige box, running a full-screen video clip. The demonstration was not connected to a keyboard or mouse -- eliminating the chance a visitor might try to view details of its configuration -- and was described simply as "Barcelona solution." A Supermicro executive manning the company's booth said most of the interest in the server seemed to come from Intel employees, eager for a glimpse of the chip AMD is counting on to revive its flagging fortunes in the server market. Three Barcelona servers are on display at AMD's booth, but little information was available on the chips themselves. Uniwide's Barcelona server is a single-processor rack server with room for 32GB of DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory and a 300-watt power supply. Tyan's Barcelona server was a two-processor system that can hold 64GB of DDR2 memory and uses a 600-watt power supply. The Barcelona servers at Computex are all running engineering samples of the chip that were provided to help server makers build their systems. AMD declined to offer detailed specifications, but said the chips are on track to ship during the third quarter. Â
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Opteron to gain power preservation tech - and other goodies
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November 08, 2004 - AnandTech have slapped up a great feature and review on ATI&#39;s new chipset for AMD processors, which seems to give Nvidia a run for their money.
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ATI Technologies on Monday delivered the Radeon Xpress 200, a new chipset for desktops using Advanced Micro Devices&#39; Athlon 64 and other eighth-generation processors.
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U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices  AMD.N has unveiled a low-cost Internet access device that  could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time  technology users in the developing world.
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Upgrade to high-performance server will include AMD's dual-core chip.
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Blog: AMD announces price cuts for its desktop processors
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AMD reported a heavy loss for its fourth quarter on Thursday, due mostly to charges connected to its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI.AMD reported a net loss of $1.772 billion -- greater than its revenue for the quarter, which was $1.770 billion. The figures compare to a loss in the fourth quarter last year of $576 million on revenue of $1.773 million.The net loss included charges of $1.675 billion, mostly related to&#160;AMD&#39;s acquisition of ATI in 2006. Excluding the charges, AMD said its loss would have been $97 million, greater than the $25 million it lost in the fourth quarter a year earlier.This is the fifth-straight quarterly loss for AMD, which has been struggling to get its newest processors to market on time.AMD delayed volume shipments of its quad-core Opteron processors, code-named Barcelona, in early December when it said it found a bug in the chip&#39;s Level 3 cache memory. Earlier this month,&#160;AMD said it was pushing back the release of its quad-core Phenom 9700 and 9900 processors.The company still managed to ship a record number of microprocessors in the quarter, it said on Thursday, including nearly 400,000 of its quad-core chips.
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Earlier this week, AMD's introduction of the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor at the $464 suggested price point signaled the start of CPU price reductions in its midrange segment. But since that time, pre-order prices for the 6000+ have risen, not fallen; and meanwhile, street prices for Intel CPUs have declined a tick or two, according to Pricewatch.