AMD demos first dual-core processor
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has demonstrated the company's first dual-core microprocessors at its Austin, Texas, office, the company said Tuesday.
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October unveiling alongside AMD dualie Athlon 64 FX
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Blog: So many cores, so little support. Microsoft's Ty Carlson knows the software industry has lots of work ahead to satisfy future multicore processors.
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Well, Intel did say - dismissively of course - that wasn&#39;t going to try to match AMD&#39;s little dual-core Opteron demo coup of last week and show off a dual-core Xeon at the Intel Developer Forum this week and - as good as its word - it didn&#39;t.
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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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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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InfoWorld - AMD hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market from&#160;its rival Intel&#160;on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor.
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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 took the wraps off its first ever x86 64-bit dual-core processor during demonstrations held at the company&#39;s Austin facilities Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - AMD on Monday is giving the public an advanced look at how its pending quad-core chip will improve performance and save energy. AMD, playing catch-up to rival Intel, whoseÂ quad-core XeonÂ product launched in 2006, will discuss features of its quad-core product, code-named Barcelona, at the International Solid States Circuits Conference in San Francisco, a forum for engineers in solid state circuitry and system-on-a-chip processor design. AMD says it will present details at the conference of how Barcelona, due to be released in mid-2007, improves performance and energy efficiency over the competition and over its own dual-core processor, the Opteron, which it introduced in 2003. Barcelona will feature "Enhanced PowerNow" technology, which will dynamically adjust core frequencies as workloads change in order to power down cores when not needed to save energy, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for Opteron. Under the PowerNow technology already deployed in the dual-core Opteron, the OS delivers the needed power to the busiest core, but if the other core is not as busy, it will still receive the voltage demanded of the busiest core, Kerby said. But with Enhanced PowerNow, while the busiest core will receive the power it needs, the OS will reduce the frequency and voltage of the remaining cores because they aren't as busy. "We still see power savings with our current PowerNow technology, but it's going to get better with Barcelona because we're going to be able to dynamically and independently adjust the core frequencies of each individual core," he said. Also in Barcelona, the OS will directly communicate with the CPU instead of first going through the CPU driver, a more efficient approach, he said. "With Barcelona, there is no CPU driver middleman. The OS can tell the processor directly, 'Hey this is how much work I'm doing,' and the Barcelona core will determine when the best time is to make that change. It's not doing it blindly," he said. Barcelona also separates the power management of the cores from that of the memory controller, which is embedded in AMD-designed processors. That way, frequency and voltage can be reduced to the cores when they are not busy and increased to the memory controller when it is busy, and vice versa. AMD claims an 80 percent reduction in memory controller power usage with this design change. Barcelona will also feature enhanced clock-gating, which means core logic circuits can be turned on or off to save power. Like settings on a coffee grinder, the chip can do "coarse" or "fine" clock gating, shutting down increasingly finer sections of core logic as needed. AMD claims that Barcelona can deliver a 40 percent improvement in performance over "the competition." While not mentioning Intel's Xeon specifically, AMD has long pointed out that its quad-core chip will be four cores designed on the same piece of silicon, while Intel's design is two dual-core processors packaged together.
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It's history, perched on a fence Analysis Vendors, vendors everywhere: Yep, all the major players turned up in Barcelona at the EMEA launch of AMD's so-called "native" quad-core Opteron processor chip. Well okay, nearly all.â¦
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SHANGHAI - While much has been made of efforts by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp. to bring dual-core processors to PCs and servers, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. announced Tuesday at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany, details of a dual-core PowerPC processor designed for embedded applications, such as networking and storage.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) launched a motherboard with four cores on Thursday, targeting gaming enthusiasts in an effort to keep pace with the release of quad-core chips by rival Intel. AMD's Quad FX Platform includes two dual-core Athlon 64 FX-70 series chips and uses Nvidia's 680a chip set. AMD's choice of components shows it is willing to follow open standards even though the companyÂ acquired Nvidia's rival ATI TechnologiesÂ earlier this month, said Ian McNaughton, product manager for Athlon 64 FX products. The launch highlights a debate in the industry about the definition of quad-core processors. Intel hasÂ claimed it won the quad-core raceÂ on Nov. 14 by packaging two dual-core chips together in the Xeon 5300 for servers and Core 2 Extreme QX6700 for gamers. But AMD calls its Quad FX Platform a "4x4," and says it won't release a true "quad-core" processor until 2007, when it combines four cores on a single piece of silicon called "Barcelona." Analysts say they won't be able to judge the winner of the debate until they can test comparable products. In the meantime, one thing is certain: a PC with four computing cores can run a lot of applications at once. PC vendors who use the Quad FX will attract more than just hard-core gamers, McNaughton said. A desktop with four computing cores can be a workstation for "megataskers," those users who watch high-definition video while burning a DVD, downloading a BitTorrent file, and chatting on a TeamSpeak connection, even as their PC runs antivirus software, Skype, and instant messaging applications in the background. "The PC usage model has changed. It's evolving, it's getting crazy and we love it," he said. "People are doing four, five, six things at the same time." Of course, gamers are still a core audience for this product. The extra cores will allow fans of multiplayer online games to play two instances of the game simultaneously, controlling two characters in a single episode of EverQuest, World of Warcraft or Lineage, according to AMD. Many of these gamers have been using AMD's Opteron server chip to manage their heavy computing loads, McNaughton said. The Quad FX Platform will be a more efficient tool for the job and will allow them to upgrade to a pair of quad-core Barcelona chips in the middle of 2007. As the hardware industry relies increasingly on multicore designs, chip power is measured by scalability and efficiency, not just frequency, said AMD spokesman Bubba Wolford. That development is pushing chip vendors to grow from being simple component suppliers to selling entire platforms. AMD has followed that trend to produce its AMD Live product for media center PCs and now the Quad FX. AMD is selling the Quad FX Platform with three types of chips built with a 90-nanometer process, charging $599 for a pair of 2.6 GHz FX-70 chips, $799 for a pair of 2.8 GHz FX-72 chips, and $999 for a pair of 3.0 GHz FX-74 chips, if purchased in lots of 1,000 units.
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It said it has demonstrated a working version of the technology based on its Opteron chip. By Darrell Dunn. The shift to dual-core microprocessors continues to accelerate.
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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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The introduction this morning by AMD of new dual-core desktop processors, including the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, and the company's subsequent lowering of prices of existing processors, may have nearly or completely equalized the price/performance balance between AMD and Intel processors.
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Preparing Athlon 6400+ to fill the gap? AMD is gearing up to launch its fastest dual-core Athlon 64 processor yet, it has been claimed. Such a product would be handy: last week, the chip maker admitted its Phenom won't appear in significant volumes until Q1 2008, later than previously thought.â¦