AMD demos four-core Opteron
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Going native in Barcelona AMD has demo'd its upcoming quad-core Opteron server processor, a few days after launching the gamer-oriented Quad FX, which despite its name is a dual-core part.â¦
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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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AMD is releasing nine versions of its new Quad-Core Opteron server chip, code-named Barcelona.
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Sun to follow? Exclusive AMD has secured yet another major partner win thanks to Opteron. Starting with the Power7 processor, IBM will give up on making its own Unix/RISC box motherboards. Instead, it will plug the Power chips directly into slightly modified Opteron boards in an effort to save money.â¦
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COMPLETE ANALYSIS of perhaps the most important CPU architectural release in AMD's history, the long-awaited response to a swarm of challenges from Intel. BetaNews talks exclusively with AMD worldwide market development manager John Fruehe, and examines five major issues which could make or break Quad-Core Opteron, and which could have lasting influence on how AMD's strategy proceeds over the next several years.
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Computers with AMD&#39;s Opteron processor will soon be able to take advantage of the same power management technology the company has already built into its laptop and desktop microchips.
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Finally ending rumors of delays, AMD announced that its quad-core Opteron server processors, known also by the codename of &quot;Barcelona,&quot; will be shipping later this summer. The chips, the company&#39;s first quad-cores, might help AMD regain its financial footing and help it compete with archrival Intel.
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AMD said its Opteron processor will be bolstered by power management technology that will decrease overall power consumption and optimize performance in enterprise server systems.
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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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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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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) said Friday it wouldÂ begin shipping its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processorÂ in August, rebutting industry rumors that the chip faced manufacturing problems that could delay it until October. Although AMD has already lined up hardware partners like Sun MicrosystemsÂ to use the chip in high-end servers, some analysts had predicted that a delayed release could cause AMD toÂ lose business to Intel. However, AMD insists it is on schedule to produce both standard and low-wattage SE (special edition) versions of Barcelona, in a range of frequencies up to 2.0GHz. The new Barcelona chips will generate the same amount of heat as current Opteron chips, but improve computing performance by 70 percent for database applications or 40 percent for floating point jobs, Allen said. Future versions of both types will run at even higher speeds, allowing customers to further improve their energy efficiency, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server and workstation division. Intel competes for those same customers today with the dual-core Woodcrest and quad-core Clovertown Xeon processorsÂ launched last year, and plans to up the ante in the fourth quarter of 2007 with quad-core "Harpertown" server chip using smaller, 45-nanometer scale components. AMD will begin shipping Barcelona chips for sale in August, and expects server vendors to ship commercial products using the chip by September. AMD hopes those new servers are popular enough to help reverse a slide in market share and revenue in recent months. The company has posted losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for the past two quarters as it struggles to survive aÂ price war with Intel. Â
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SAN JOSE, Calif.--Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday detailed performance results for its forthcoming dual-core Opteron processor, showing a speed boost of 30 percent to 55 percent compared with today&#39;s single-core models.
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Advanced Micro Devices announces faster Athlon 64 X2, cooler single-core Athlon 64 CPUs.
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AMD has raised the stakes with Intel as the pair prepare to do battle over dual-core processors following last week&#39;s demonstration of a dual-core x86 Opteron.
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(InfoWorld) - AMD will delay its launch of the Barcelona quad-core Opteron server chip from its expected date in July until October, setting the company back in its effort to compete with new processors from Intel, according to analyst reports. Processor companies make more money selling server chips than desktop or laptop chips, so the move will hit AMD's 2007 earnings hard, pushing the company to lose $2.59 per share instead of only $2.48 per share, according to a report released Tuesday by Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung. "Barcelona is generally viewed to beÂ AMD's best opportunity to stem server share loss to Intel. While AMD's recent notebook win at Toshiba may balance any negative revenue implications to our current model, Barcelona's delay has negative implications for AMD's gross margin," Yeung wrote. His estimate is a larger loss than the consensus Thomson Financial forecast that AMD will lose $2.47 per share for 2007. The news comes at a bad time for AMD, which has promised for months that it would launch the chip in the second half of 2007,Â helping the company to rebound from the effects of a price war with Intel. AMD is already hurting,Â posting a $611 million first-quarter lossÂ in April, following on the heels of theÂ $574 million loss reported in JanuaryÂ for fourth quarter earnings last year. Barcelona is the key to taking that fiscal burden off AMD's shoulders,Â AMD CEO Hector Ruiz said on May 3 at the company's annual shareholder meeting. Although Intel is several quarters ahead in improving its chip manufacturing capabilities, AMD stays competitive by creating more innovative designs, he said. AMD claims Barcelona will deliver better performance on memory-intensive applications than Intel's Clovertown quad-core Xeon server chips that have been on the market since November. AMD stuck to its guns on Wednesday, insisting that it is still on schedule, and pointing as evidence to itsÂ demonstration on Tuesday of prototype Barcelona chips in serversÂ from infrastructure partners Supermicro Computer, Tyan Computer, and Uniwide Technologies at theÂ Computex trade show in Taipei. "We remain on track for a summer 2007 launch with partners shipping platforms in the third quarter," said AMD spokeswoman Marian Kelley. She blamed the delay rumors on Cray's announcement Monday that it expects revenue to drop because of a delay in shipping its quad-core Cray XT4 systems. In fact, Cray was referring to AMD's midrange Budapest processor, not Barcelona, she said. "The guidance that we've been giving and that we're sticking to is that Budapest will follow Barcelona in the second half of 2007," Kelley said. Despite AMD's assurances, other analysts echoed the Citigroup report, saying they have heard similar news from server vendors, distributors and board makers. On May 30, another report called AMD's promise to launch Barcelona in mid-2007 "a head fake" since the chip will not be available at full volume until August at the earliest, according to a note from analyst Patrick Wang at Thomas Weisel Partners. In contrast, Intel is expected to succeed in shipping its Penryn processors in the late third quarter or early fourth quarter. That timing will allow Intel to essentially catch up to AMD and soften the blow of losing sales to customers who see a performance advantage in Barcelona, Wang said.
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The first official benchmark test results for Intel's Tigerton series and AMD's Barcelona series were released by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. From a pure prowess perspective, neither the new quad-core Xeon MPs nor the new quad-core Opterons walk away with an all-around victory, with Intel's X7350 stealing the show in integer throughput, and AMD's 8350 winning the race in floating-point throughput.
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AMD&#39;s new dual-core Opteron chip is designed mainly for corporate computing applications, including databases, Web services, and financial transactions.