AMD, Cray and reporter in Barcelona caper
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Colonel Mustard in Q4 with a processor An uncomfortable war of speculation over the ship date for AMD's four-core Barcelona processor has broken out between the chipmaker, supercomputer vendor Cray and the Dow Jones newswire.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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Phenom plus RD790 plus RV670 AMD looks set to give its 'Spider' high-end gaming platform its first major outing on 14 November - two days after Intel introduces its first 45nm 'Penryn' processors - Register Hardware has learned.â¦
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Tired of being pushed around AMD today attempted to rescue some initiative in its battle with Intel with pot shots aimed its rival's server, desktop, and even developing world strategies.â¦
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Some clubbers in Barcelona have opted to have a microchip implanted which lets them pay for drinks.
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The showdown is set for AMD's Barcelona with Intel's release today of Xeon 7300 chips.
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Micro-bogged news feeds While struggling to get its chip machismo back, AMD has decided to distract itself as much as possible by rolling out a new Twitter-based news service.â¦
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The documents in question were brought to court during Intel&#39;s legal battle with Intergraph. AMD believes they show its arch-rival to be guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, which is why it wanted the EC to take a look.
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The CanSecWest security research conference promoters are thinking about giving hackers another shot at hacking a Mac, as well as Linux- and Windows-based PCs.
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By Ryan Blitstein, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  SJ-0524-AMD-subpoenas-Intel-s-lawyers   AMD subpoenas Intel's lawyers   Ryan Blitstein  San Jose Mercury  News, Calif.
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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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AMD is looking to Barcelona to improve its overall financial outlook; stock prices already on the upswing.
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Let's talk GPUs AMD and Nvidia have been put on notice by the US Department of Justice in relation to an investigation around possible anti-trust violations by graphics chip makers.â¦
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AMD : ERRATUM - Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited et AMD lance le communicateur Internet personnel. Les services haut dÃ©bit de TATA Indicom facilitent l&#39;accÃ¨s bon marchÃ© Ã  Internet en Inde.
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Powerful processor will target high-end desktop PCs in an effort to stay ahead of AMD.
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AMD is looking to take market share in the server, corporate desktop and notebook space using its x86 architecture. &quot;We&#39;re talking x86 chips down to a buck,&quot; said AMD CEO Hector Ruiz at a conference on Friday.
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Barcelona is finally here. Four years since its last major chip upgrade, AMD is introducing the quad-core Operton server processor, which the company has described as &quot;the most advanced x86 processor&quot; ever made.