Rackable and Intel scratch each other behind AMD's back
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Feels like the first time IDF Dangle a few thousand customers in front of a vendor, and just about anyone will show up to the Intel Developer Forum. Case in point, longtime Opteron backer Rackable Systems, which graced IDF with its CEO Tom Barton â in the midst of Intel CEO Paul Otellini's keynote no less.â¦
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AMD released two extremely powerful chips recently after Intel had to back down from the plan of manufacturing a 4GHz version of their Pentium 4 processor.
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Peter Glaskowsky analyzes the potential benefits of AMD's new quad-core Opteron processors for data centers.
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Dell and Intel have danced this dance before, only this time the tune has changed. &quot;Historically Dell has done this because they aren&#39;t getting the response they want from Intel and then Intel
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(Load based on the average seating of a Greyhound bus) Rackable Systems is willing to cram the Intel 5400 chipset into pretty much any chassis it can get its hands on. Today the server n' storage firm began selling 13 new servers based on Xeon 5000 series quad-core chips.â¦
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One of these days AMD's going to take a bite out of Intel and not let go.
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Never to be left outdone for long, AMD answered Intel's challenge yesterday at a press event in San Francisco, unveiling a system design that, while not a single CPU, makes the case for "teraflop on a budget."  It's a four-processor system that uses a pair of Opterons and a pair of co-opted ATI R600 graphics chips.
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COMPLETE ANALYSIS of perhaps the most important CPU architectural release in AMD's history, the long-awaited response to a swarm of challenges from Intel. BetaNews talks exclusively with AMD worldwide market development manager John Fruehe, and examines five major issues which could make or break Quad-Core Opteron, and which could have lasting influence on how AMD's strategy proceeds over the next several years.
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Eyeing Sun's Niagara flow Intel has confirmed plans to "tick" and "tock" AMD into submission.â¦
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When Fully buffered DIMMs attack A recent benchmark comparing quad-core chips asserts that Intel Xeon-based servers have an edge in performance but are complete power hogs when compared to the dainty energy appetite of AMD Opteron-based servers.â¦
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Plain kit, sweet file system Rackable Systems this week made an unusual acquisition for a no nonsense server vendor. It bought flashy storage software maker Terrascale for $38m in cash.â¦
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Chip maker offers few details about its plans for dual-core server processors.
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Must improve AMD suffered from the same desktop chip syndrome as rival Intel during its second quarter, as the company handed in another loss.â¦
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If you pay, you can fill our slot AMD has expanded its friends and family program in an obvious way by allowing partners to plug their CPUs, accelerators and other components directly into Opteron processor sockets. AMD's unveiling today of Torrenza 2 - aka the Torrenza Innovation Socket - builds on an existing deal that let third parties tap into the company's Hypertransport technology. Now, AMD has agreed to open up the entire Opteron socket specifications to preferred partners willing to pay a licensing fee. As a result, customers could start seeing some odd but fantastic motherboards with, for example, a mix of Opteron and Cell chips or even an UltraSPARC T1/Opteron combo.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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Recent months have seen AMD taking an upper hand over Intel in the chip market. And the latest news is another new indication that Intel is struggling to keep up with the pace they once spearheaded.
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Move is the latest setback for the chip Intel once billed as an industry standard.