What bad year? AMD's Hector Ruiz gets a raise
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AMD has decided to give its CEO a raise despite a horrible year for the company plagued by product delays and poor execution.
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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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Blog: The former head of ATI Technologies, acquired by AMD last year, resigns amid troubled times for the chipmaker.
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For 35 years, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD ) stood in the shadow of archrival Intel Corp. (INTC ) AMD churned out lower-priced clones of the tech leader&#39;s chips and occasionally enjoyed a hit that helped boost its meager profits.
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Advanced Micro Devices  (AMD), the world's second-largest maker of computer microprocessors, posted a wider quarterly loss on Thursday due to a $1.68 billion charge from its purchase of graphics chipmaker ATI.
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Loved and lost AMD's obsession with top server and PC makers has proved costly. The chip maker claims to have focused on so-called Tier 1 OEMs at the expense of its longtime channel partners and now blames declining channel sales for its expected first quarter revenue miss.â¦
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Four years after its splashy launch, chip maker is still struggling.
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CEO tells why the move to multicore chips is a necessary one, and how Intel "ate crow." Also: the Microsoft and AMD factors.
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Calls for end to illegal monopolies AMD boss Hector Ruiz today called for an end to âillegal abusesâ by Intel - the AMD competitor that controls 80 percent of the worldwide x86 microprocessor market.â¦
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After a bout of good fortune, AMD finds itself coming to grips with a resurgent Intel. Plus: Can software keep up with multicore technology?
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SAN FRANCISCO - As expected, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) third-quarter revenue came in a little under the company's earlier predictions, but strong increases in sales of its 64-bit desktop and server processors led to the company's fourth straight profitable quarter.
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With a few strong years of market gains and product reviews, AMD isn't about to rest on its laurels.
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InfoWorld - Amid further delays of AMD's quad-core server chip and plans to write off goodwill from the acquisition of ATI, AMD executives are going to face tough questions when they meet financial analysts in New York Thursday.
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What will the future hold for AMD?
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Still carrying the weight of costs related to last year&#39;s&#160;acquisition of graphics vendor ATI, AMD recorded its fourth straight quarter of net losses Thursday.The company reported a net loss of $396 million, or $0.71 per share, for the third quarter, compared to net income of $136 million for the year-earlier quarter. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had estimated a loss of $0.62 per share. The loss included a $120 million charge related to its acquisition of ATI last year.AMD recorded third-quarter revenue of $1.632 billion for the quarter ending Sept. 29, an 18 percent year-over-year increase.The company sold a record number of microprocessors during the quarter, AMD said in a news release. Microprocessor unit shipments increased 19 percent year-over-year and mobile processor shipments increased 68 percent, AMD said.After months of delays,&#160;AMD finally released its latest quad-core Barcelona processor in September.&#160;AMD is locked in a quad-core chip battle with Intel, which shipped more than 2 million quad-core processors during the quarter, Intel said in its earnings call on Tuesday.AMD has already lost ground in the market for server chips to Intel in recent quarters. AMD&#39;s quad-core Opteron processor, also called Barcelona, opened up a revenue stream for company during the quarter, the company said.
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&quot;The bad blood and legal wrangling between Intel and AMD goes back a decade,&quot; Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with the research firm Illuminata, told the E-Commerce Times.
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Global chipmaker AMD has taken up the cudgel of IT-enabling half of the worldâs population, by 2015, in what could be one the most ambitious initiatives undertaken by any technology manufacturer so far.