AMD pushes embedded chips with faster Geode
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The new chips are targeted at kiosks and cash registers, as well as larger platforms like set-top boxes and thin-client PCs, and will likely power the $100 system for the One Laptop Per Child project.
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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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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.
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Bulldozer injection Still intent on improving single thread software performance, AMD has outlined some planned additions to the x86 instruction set that will appear in chips shipping in 2009.â¦
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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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Latest Athlon 64 processors feature advanced manufacturing technology.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has begun shipping commercial versions of its Athlon 64 processors made using a 90-nanometer process, marking another step forward in the company's transition to the more advanced manufacturing technology.
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Company touts advantages of its Solaris operating system running on  AMD Opteron processors
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According to AMD, the Mobile AMD Athlon 64 processor 3000+ is the first processor manufactured with AMD&#39;s 90-nanometer technique, a semiconductor process designed to enable higher performance without increased power consumption.
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Computex: As Via finds traction in the ultraportable market, it pushes the limits of small form factors.
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InfoWorld - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. wants developers to start thinking about how they can speed up their software using new instructions that will appear in the company&#39;s processors from 2009. The additions could simplify the way developers code the iterative calculations used to shade graphics, render photos or add spatial effects to audio.
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The chip is expected to be unveiled Tuesday, in time to bump up the performance of game desktops before the holidays.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) is expected to unveil its most powerful desktop processors to date on Tuesday, a few days after rival Intel Corp. disclosed changes to its desktop processor road map.
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A chip capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) is unveiled by Intel.
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AMD plans to combine the functions of three chips -- the GPU (graphics processing unit ), core-logic chipset, and CPU --&#160;into one, code-named &quot;Swift,&quot; an executive said Thursday.The company, which runs second to Intel in the global microprocessor business, plans to launch Swift in the second half of 2009. It&#39;s using parts of several of its top chips to create this new device, which it calls an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit).&quot;I keep telling you that it&#39;s not all about the CPU. The CPU is important, but now there are other blocks that contribute to the experience a consumer gets in a machine,&quot; said Mario Rivas, an executive vice president at AMD, during an analyst meeting broadcast on the Internet Thursday.Several chips make a difference in PC performance, he said. Swift will carry AMD&#39;s &quot;Stars&quot; processor cores, the company&#39;s latest graphics cores, and the northbridge from Griffin, the central processor used in its newest laptop PC platform.The new chip will be AMD&#39;s second attempt at such combinations.&#160;The company has pledged to launch a chip code-named &quot;Fusion&quot; late next year or in early 2009 that integrates the CPU and the graphics processor on one chip. AMD says combining the chips in Fusion will increase performance and energy efficiency.Such work is important to the computing industry as people demand smaller, battery-dependent devices. It also saves space. The fewer chips required inside a laptop, for example, the more space a designer has to make it smaller or add other features.Swift will be made using AMD&#39;s 45-nanometer production technology, Rivas said.The company was unable to immediately provide further details of the new chip.
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As expected, Advanced Micro Devices, on Tuesday officially released its new microprocessors aimed at high-end desktop computers. The new chips set the new records in a variety of industrial benchmarks and
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InfoWorld - After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices&#39; latest processor, a quad-core server chip called&#160;Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the market&#160;Monday.