AMD Speeds Up Dual-Core Processor
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Advanced Micro Devices announces faster Athlon 64 X2, cooler single-core Athlon 64 CPUs.
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Fall developers' conference describes faster CPUs for demanding tasks.
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Remedy for recent shortages, it's suggested AMD will ship its 65nm dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processors a week on Tuesday, it has been claimed. If correct, the 5 December debut apparently marks an acceleration of AMD's anticipated 65nm roll-out schedule.â¦
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AMD is pushing back the release of two Phenom processors just as it speeds up the release of what it's calling an energy-efficient quad-core chip.In November, AMD announced that its upcoming Phenom 9700 and 9900 processors would ship in the first quarter of this year. John Taylor, a spokesman for AMD, told Computerworld Friday that they're being pushed back to a second-quarter delivery.At the same time, Taylor said that the company is picking up the pace in delivering its 9100E processor. The 9100E, which reportedly uses a third less power than regular Phenom chips, had been slated on in-house road maps to ship in either Q2 or Q3, but is now on the docket to be released this quarter, he said.Not so long ago, AMD discovered an errata in the Transition Lookaside Buffer that delayed shipments of some of the highly anticipated Barcelona chips. The errata -- a bug -- also affects Phenom processors, which are based on the same architecture.With the delayed Barcelona chips weighing down AMD, which had its fair share of financial struggles last year, there was quick online chatter about what this new delay will mean for the company. Taylor was adamant, though, in saying that the delay is part of a rearranging of priorities rather than a major problem with the chips."No, no. It's much more a matter of prioritization and resources than any problems with the processors themselves," he added. "Our focus is on the energy-efficient products and triple-core products."Taylor said AMD's plan to ship a triple-core processor in the first quarter is still on track. "[Resellers] want triple-core as fast as they can because it gives them differentiation and it hits a sweet spot in the market," he added.That means AMD should be releasing the energy-efficient 9100E processor during this quarter, along with the triple-core and long-expected Barcelona chips."Yes, we're seeing [negative online buzz about delayed products], but our focus is on making sure we get products right when we introduce them and making sure the end-users get a good experience," said Taylor. "We are having to make tough choices about prioritizing. Just watch us over the next few months when we get triple-core on the market and this energy-efficient processor in the market."Earlier this week, AMD announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show that its new laptop processor, code-named Puma, will ship in the second quarter of this year. Trying to generate some positive buzz after months of taking it on the chin while rival Intel hit its stride, AMD said its new notebook system will optimize battery life while bearing up to hefty graphics demands.
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Sun Microsytems Inc. on Tuesday unveiled an upgrade of its dual-core UltraSPARC processor, which the company claims is twice as fast as the older version.
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Powerful processor will target high-end desktop PCs in an effort to stay ahead of AMD.
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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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On Tuesday, Advanced Micro Devices introduced its two fastest processors yet, a quiet slap at Intel&#39;s latest roadmap revision.
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AMD has been demonstrating the industryâs first x86 dual-core processor at its Austin facilities on an HP ProLiant DL585 server powered by four dual-core Opteron processors manufactured on 90nm SOI process technology, the company announced today.
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AMD is expected to unveil its most powerful desktop processors to date this week, a few days after rival Intel disclosed changes to its desktop processor road map.
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Intel will deliver the company's first quad-core processors for high-performance PCs and servers in November, getting the jump on rival AMD in providing the next generation of chips designed to deliver the power needed to handle high-definition video, cutting-edge games, and math-intensive number-crunching.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) on Wednesday announced three dual-core additions to its Opteron processor lineup that use less power than standard versions of the chip. At the same time, the company added more dual-core Opteron chips to the high end of the line. Power consumption has become increasingly important in recent years, as companies look to wring the most computing performance from the power they consume, and reduce the heat generated by denser blade servers. The Opteron 1218 HE, 2218 HE and 8218 HE are 2.6GHz chips designed to require a maximum 68 watts of power, compared to 95 watts for the standard versions of the chips. The other new additions to the Opteron line, the 2220 and 8220, are 2.8GHz chips that designed for high-end servers and workstations and consume a maximum 95 watts of power, AMD said. All of the new chips are manufactured using a 90-nanometer production process and have 2MB of on-chip cache, according to AMD's Web site. The 1218 HE is priced at $432 in 1,000-unit quantities, a standard quotation method for processor sales. The 2218 HE and 8218 HE chips are priced at $611 and $1,340, respectively, in the same quantities. The 2220 and 8220 are priced at $698 and $1,514. AMD said server manufacturers such as Dell, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, will offer systems based on the new chips. Details of these servers were not immediately available.
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AMD has introduced the latest additions to the company's Opteron line, boosting performance of the multi-processor power plants for X86 servers and workstations.
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Intel CEO says new quad-core gaming chip will deliver a 70 percent performance boost over dual-core chip.
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Advanced Micro Devices this week introduced its fastest desktop processor, heating up competition with rival chip maker Intel for the hearts of PC enthusiasts and hard-core gamers.
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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.