AMD debuts 65nm dual-core processors
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Athlon 64 X2 line extended AMD this morning rolled out its 65nm Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors, as expected. The chips are pitched as "energy efficient" products, and come in at the same price as their 90nm equivalents.â¦
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AMD began selling its dual-core desktop PC chip with a 65-nanometer design, making it faster and more efficient than the 90-nm version.
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Blog: AMD announces price cuts for its desktop processors
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AMD (NYSE: AMD) has unveiled a new mobile processor, adding to its portfolio of chips for notebook PCs and keeping pace with Intel's Centrino offering.
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Duo, Solo for the chop Intel has begun the process of ridding itself of an entire generation of 65nm Core processors, to pave the way for 45nm 'Penryn' Core 2 chips, due to begin appear in November. Marked for termination: all the Core Solo and Core Duo CPUs.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) began selling its top chip for desktop PCs made with a 65-nanometer design on Tuesday, continuing its efforts toÂ keep up with IntelÂ as the industry migrates from 90nm design to a faster, more efficient generation of processors. By manufacturing its dual-core Athlon 64 X2 chip on the smaller geometry, AMD will be able to increase manufacturing output while improving the chips' performance and power efficiency, said Jack Huynh, a market development manager for AMD. Some PC vendors are selling the new chip in computers already, and by the first quarter of 2007 that list will include Acer, Dell, Founder Electronics, Hewlett-Packard, Packard Bell, and Tsinghua Tongfang Co., according to AMD. The move to 65nm manufacturing is crucial for AMD as the company strives to keep up with aÂ flurry of new processors from Intel. Intel had a rough year in 2006, losing ground to AMD in market share, but has rallied in recent months. The companyÂ launched its Core 2 Duo familyÂ of desktop chips in July and itsÂ quad-core Core 2 Extreme in November. Intel switched its chip manufacturing plants to a smaller architecture months ago, and already sells more 65nm chips than 90nm chips. A chip made with 65nm process technology has smaller features -- such as transistors and the wires that connect them -- than a chip made with 90nm technology, said Rob Willoner, a technology analyst with Intel's technology and manufacturing group. That progression is the engine that drives Moore's Law, the prediction that the number of processors on a microprocessor will double every 18 months. One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, meaning that the wires on 65nm design chips are far slimmer than human hairs. Minuscule as that is, chip vendors already have plans to shrink the parts even smaller.Â Intel has already announced plansÂ to use chip features of 45nm by 2007, 32nm by 2009 and 22nm by 2011. As chip features continue to shrink, engineers struggle harder to take each new step. But as long as customers demand smaller, more efficient computers, there's plenty of economic incentive for the process to continue, he said. "There's bound to be an end at some point, but we can't see it yet," Willoner said. "At one point, people said it was 1 micron, which is 1,000nm, but the industry passed that without blinking about a decade ago. Now some people are saying it's 5nm. I don't see it happening before 2020 or 2025, and by then we could have radically different technologies to compensate." AMD chose to apply the new "Rev G" 65nm design to its high-end, dual-core desktop chip first because the company's midrange, single-core Athlon and Sempron chips are already fairly efficient, running at 62 watts using a 90nm design, said AMD's Huynh. The Athlon 64 X2 operated at a high 110 watts when it was first launched in June 2005, but this migration will bring it down to just 65 watts, he said. AMD will continue to produce both 90nm and 65nm Athlon 64 X2 chips until it phases the larger-design chips out completely by the second half of 2007. Next, AMD plans to apply the 65nm design to its single-core Athlon and Sempron chips, shrinking them by the end of 2007. And the company has already begun work on the next step, shrinking its chips to a 45nm design, although AMD did not give a specific date for that goal. AMD is selling the 65nm Athlon 64 X2 chips at prices of $301 for a 2.6GHz 5000-series chip, $271 for the 2.5GHz 4800 series, $214 for the 2.3GHz 4400 series, and $169 for the 2.1GHz 4000 series, all priced in lots of 1,000. Â
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AMD has launched the Mobile AMD Athlon 64 processor, a low-power version of its 32/64-bit chip aimed at the thin-and-light notebook market.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Further pitting itself against Intel Corp.'s Pentium-M offerings, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) on Monday expanded its lineup of mobile Athlon 64-bit processors.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) showed a laboratory version of its promised "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron 8000 server chip to analysts on Thursday, saying it planned to begin selling the product in the second quarter of 2007. AMDÂ will pitch the chip to users of high-end, commercial workstations and servers, who could see performance improvements of up to 70 percent in database applications and 40 percent in floating-point applications compared to AMD's dual-core "Rev F" Opteron. The demonstration Thursday, to analysts gathered in Berkeley, California, was AMD's second effort to show that it is keeping up with quad-core chips from rival Intel Corp. AMD also launched its "4x4" Quad FX Platform, a motherboard with two dual-core Athlon 64 FX-70 series chips intended for the desktop gaming market. Intel lost significant market share to AMD in 2006Â as it was criticized for being slow to produce chips that emphasized power efficiency instead of pure calculating speed. Intel hasÂ bounced back in recent monthsÂ with the launch of dual-core chips including the Core 2 Duo for desktops and Xeon 5100 "Woodcrest" for servers. On Nov. 14 Intel reached the market first with quad-core chips, with the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 for gamers and Xeon 5300 for servers. Intel has alsoÂ led the industry in converting its chip designsÂ from the 90-nanometer process to 65 nm, including all four processors mentioned above. In response, AMD has criticized Intel's quad-core design as merely gluing two dual-core Woodcrest chips together, whereas the Barcelona chip includes all four cores on a single piece of silicon. Analysts are divided on the impact of that distinction, and say they cannot measure the difference until they compare benchmarks from both finished versions. Still, AMD trumpeted Barcelona as an engineering achievement that marks the company's shift to 65-nm architecture. By shrinking the processor die, AMD is able to improve power efficiency and squeeze an extra level of shared cache memory onto the design, said John Fruehe, AMD's worldwide market development manager for server and workstation products. "As you add more cores, it becomes less about brute force and more about the efficiency of how many things you can do at once, and how efficiently you can order them," he said. "From a customer perspective, those who will see the biggest bang for their buck with quad-core are people running applications like larger databases. The more threaded an application is, the more benefit you get." The users who will see the greatest return on their quad-core investment are users of multithreaded applications like CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning), e-commerce and virtualization, Fruehe said. AMD will first launch the Barcelona design on a four-socket board (running four quad-core chips) and a two-socket board (running two quad-core chips). The company will wait until later in 2007 to launch single-socket Barcelona boards, which are used mainly to develop new applications for the larger servers or to run Web farms to handle multiple simultaneous processing requests. AMD expects servers vendors such as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. to adopt the new technology for their servers in 2007, although none of those companies has yet made a public announcement.
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The introduction this morning by AMD of new dual-core desktop processors, including the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, and the company's subsequent lowering of prices of existing processors, may have nearly or completely equalized the price/performance balance between AMD and Intel processors.
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ATI Technologies Inc. announced an integrated chipset family for the AMD Athlon 64 and Sempron procesor families on Monday, helping AMD push its 64-bit technology down into the value space.
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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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Aiming to deflate archrival Intel, Advanced Micro Devices this week will show off its dual-core chips, which will start to trickle out toward the middle of next year.
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AMD will make the first public demonstration of a system build out of its dual-core processors today, the result of a strategy first made public almost a year ago.
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Advanced Micro Devices is making a push to beat Intel in the development of dual core microprocessors based on x86 chips.  On Tuesday, AMD (NYSE: AMD) unveiled a prototype dual-core Opteron processor running in a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant server.
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Who's best for games - and Windows Vista? Head-to-Head Make no mistake about it, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor struggles to compete with Intel's Core 2 Duo, and the upcoming four-core Core 2 Quad will move the goalposts even further away. Which gives AMD a major problem until it starts to roll out Athlon 64 X4 mid-2007. Meanwhile, it canât rely on sales of mobile processors as that sector is owned by Centrino and it must surely be worried about Opteronâs position as Intel spreads its Core technology into servers.â¦
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AMD took the wraps off its first ever x86 64-bit dual-core processor during demonstrations held at the company&#39;s Austin facilities Tuesday.