Quad-Core Barcelona Is Only A Start For AMD
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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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In response to a BetaNews inquiry over whether last Friday's announcement of new Barcelona server-class processors at frequencies up to 2.0 GHz for August release was as fast as we would see for the year, an AMD spokesperson told us faster models would be made available later in the year.
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With Christmas just 11 days away, you have to wonder what Hector Ruiz is going to find under his tree. It&#8217;s been a terrible year for Advanced Micro Devices, and the chipmaker&#8217;s analysts conference on Thursday did nothing to spread holiday cheer.Confirming what many in the chip world had suspected for some time, CEO Ruiz and other AMD execs fessed up that bugs in its new quad-core Barcelona server and Phenom desktop chips will&#160;delay these key next-generation technologies.The technical problems will delay general availability of the fastest version of the chips for three or four months. Customers willing to settle for slower clock speeds will be able to get the processors sooner; for example, AMD will ship a 2 gigahertz version of the Barcelona first, instead of the expected 2.5 gigahertz speed. In either case, the chips will be close to a year late; the original target date was the first quarter of 2007.AMD STUMBLES AS INTEL SPEEDS AHEADThe problem couldn&#8217;t come at a worse time. AMD has struggled all year to close the performance gap between its high-end chips and Intel&#8217;s. Barcelona, the company had promised, would restore its technical supremacy. Indeed some analysts said they had expected the quad-core server chip to do just that. &#8220;At 2.5 gigahertz it would have beaten any Intel products,&#8221; said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. &#8220;But at 2 gigahertz, it&#8217;s bringing up the rear,&#8221; he said.Intel, meanwhile, has corrected many of the problems that dogged it earlier in the decade. &#8220;AMD isn&#8217;t competing against the Intel of two years ago,&#8221; said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel has had quad-core chips in the market for about a year. To be fair, its chips are based on a somewhat simpler design; Intel gets to four cores by packaging two dual-core chips together. By contrast, AMD&#8217;s design integrates four cores on one chip, a more efficient solution, said McCarron. Except that AMD&#8217;s approach reduces yields and thus raises manufacturing costs, he added.There was earlier speculation that Barcelona&#8217;s problems were related to the ATI graphics chipset, but the problem turns out to be deeper, at the chip level. AMD has said it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor&#39;s L3 cache.DOUBTS ABOUT A QUICK FIXIn the Thursday conference, analysts had expected discussion of the company&#8217;s &#8220;asset light strategy,&#8221; which will apparently entail outsourcing more manufacturing to foundries such as Chartered Semiconductor or TSMC. But they didn&#8217;t get it, and the lack of details made CEO Ruiz&#8217;s promise to return to profitability in 2008 less credible to Wall Street. AMD&#8217;s financial performance has been terrible, losing money for four straight quarters. Part of the reason: Intel and AMD have engaged in a bloody price war, a struggle that has been very tough on the smaller company&#8217;s profit margins. But the Barcelona and Phenom delays are serious self-inflicted wounds.AMD&#8217;s stock lost another few points yesterday and has now shed about 40% in the last two months and a bone-jarring 56% since the beginning of the year. At $8.84 a share, Thursday&#8217;s closing price, the stock is at its lowest ebb since the summer of 2003. Ironically, AMD has so far&#160;rewarded Ruiz with pay raises.
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After its recent delays and missteps, chip maker sets its sights on a dual-core future.
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Preps pair of Octals Entire computing platforms have come and gone* in the time that it has taken AMD to shove the four-core version of Opteron known as Barcelona into end customers' hands.â¦
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market from its rival Intel Corp. on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor.
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(InfoWorld) - As Sun Microsystems prepares to demonstrate a new high-performance computer Tuesday at a technology conference in Germany, it hopes that quad-core processors from Advanced Micro DevicesÂ that will power the computer arrive on time to deliver one of the machines to its first customer. Sun is going to introduce its Constellation system at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, at which other supercomputer makers are gathering and at which a twice-yearly list of the world's Top 500 supercomputers is to be released Wednesday. IBM, whose Blue Gene/L supercomputer wasÂ No. 1 in a November 2006 Top 500 listÂ based on system performance, will introduce what it says is a still faster Blue Gene/P Tuesday. Sun chose the AMD Opteron quad-core chip,Â code-named Barcelona, over rival Intel'sÂ quad-core Xeon 5300 chip, because it believes AMD's will be "the fastest chip on the market this year," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We are still hopeful that they will deliver the chips on time." Sun also hopes Constellation can be out in time to be considered for the November Top 500 list. AMD's stock was downgraded June 6 by some investment analysts who questioned the chip maker's ability to deliver Barcelona on time. But AMD spokesman Phil Hughes said Monday that "we're still on track" for a Barcelona launch in the third quarter. Constellation is targeting IBM, which held an industry-leading 47.8 percent market share on the earlier Top 500 list, because its Blue Gene line is "the fastest machine out there," Bechtolsheim acknowledged. But Sun's Constellation is built with open industry standard components, such as x64 processors, Sun blade servers, Sun Fire x4500 storage, and open source Solaris or Linux operating system software, while IBM's Blue Gene is built from custom-made components. "Our observation is that industry standard open architecture has caught up with special-purpose computers. That's what we really mean to say here," Bechtolsheim said. Sun believes that building a supercomputer from custom parts takes too much time and costs too much money to build. But building a custom machine may allow IBM to pull further ahead of the rest of the field. IBM claims in a news release that the coming Blue Gene/P has triple the performance of version L, including a potential top processing speed of 3 petaflops (P flops). A petaflop is 1,000 trillion flops (floating-point operations per second), a measure of how many computer calculations can be made in that time. Sun says the Constellation features a total 131,072 processor cores, can operate at up to 1.08 petaflops, has 100TB of memory, and an input-output (I/O) speed (the speed at which data can be moved in and out of the central processing unit) of 3TBps. A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes. The Top 500 supercomputers list, compiled by university researchers in the U.S. and Germany, ranks supercomputer systems that are usually operated in government or university research centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Sun is in the process of building a Constellation supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin. The TACC received a $59 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2006 to build the supercomputer.
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Four-core coming AMD has grown tired of hearing about Intel's four-core Xeon wonders and so countered today with some faster Opterons and some lower-voltage ones. If you can't beat them with cores, beat them with variety.â¦
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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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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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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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Upcoming Opteron chips will occupy the same space as single-core models.
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Advanced Micro Devices plans to ratchet up the clock speed of its new Barcelona chip by year's end, as part of its effort to catch up to rival Intel in the market for quad-core server processors.
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Blog: AMD announces its quad core server chips will ship in August
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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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AMD has delayed rollouts of its higher-speed enthusiast level quad-core CPUs for at least one quarter.
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At a conference this week, AMD will present more details about how its Barcelona line improves performance and energy efficiency over the competition.