AMD improved Opterons with PowerNow feature
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AMD&#39;s Opteron processors will soon be able to take advantage of the same powermanagement technology the company has already built into its desktop and laptop processors.
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Like a boxer recovering from several body blows, AMD has thrown a punch back at its opponent, Intel. But will AMD&#39;s first quad-core server chip, the new Opteron, help turn things around for the beleaguered chipmaker?
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Chop, chop AMD has followed up last week's Opteron price cuts with a round of reductions applied to its Athlon-brand processors. The latest cuts affect both single- and dual-core versions of the 64-bit CPU family.â¦
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Though about the same size, the forthcoming dual-core Opteron will be up to 55 percent faster than today's single-core chips, AMD says.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices has released further details of its Torrenza project, which will one day allow server manufacturers to optimize servers for specific tasks by placing accelerator chips right on the motherboard. SinceÂ unveiling TorrenzaÂ in June, AMD has been working on the specifications of a new physical interface that chip manufacturers can use to develop custom accelerator chips that will plug into a server motherboard, alongside or in place of an AMD processor, said Doug O'Flaherty, AMD's divisional manager for acceleration strategy. That interface, the Torrenza Innovation Socket, will use the same 1207-pin Revision F socket that AMD is using for its latest generation of Opteron chips, and will communicate with the main processor using a HyperTransport connection, O'Flaherty said. HyperTransport is a specification for high-speed communications between chips or circuit boards, proposed by AMD and now managed by the HyperTransport Consortium. AMD also announced that the project had won the support of six server manufacturers: Cray, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. "We have exposed our road map in great detail to [equipment manufacturers]," O'Flaherty said. "We are expecting some of the first pieces of the platform in the latter half of 2007." Server manufacturers could use the interface to add chips to speed up the processing of XML (Extensible Markup Language) or floating-point calculations, or even to improve gaming performance with a physics accelerator, said Giuseppe Amato, AMD's technical director sales and marketing for Europe. Such accelerators are already available for some applications as add-in PCI Express cards, he said. Manufacturers of accelerator chips will be able to improve their performance further by moving them closer to the main processor and connecting them via the Torrenza Innovation Socket. "It's close to PCI Express. The physical layer changes, but the protocol is PCI Express," he said.
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Opteron to gain power preservation tech - and other goodies
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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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originally offered on notebook PCs -- to its Opteron 32- and 64-bit x86 processors for server applications. The technology will help servers to run
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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 used the Fall Processor Forum to provide more details about its dual-core Opteron architecture which is scheduled to be released by mid of 2005.
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SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA - Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) dual-core Opteron processor will fit into the same area occupied by its single-core product, helping to hold down manufacturing costs, AMD said Tuesday at the Fall Processor Forum.
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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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HEWLETT-PACKARD Co has enhanced its high-end workstation offering with the new xw9400, which is powered by a Dual Core AMD Opteron processor.
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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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(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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Just like AMD Exclusive Everyone in the server world has been wondering if Intel planned a response to AMD's opening of its Opteron socket specifications. Well, The Register can reveal that Intel does indeed have a counterattack in store, and it will arrive in part at next week's Intel Developer Forum.â¦
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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.