Researchers: AMD less power-hungry than Intel
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'Opteron more efficient than Xeon' Computer performance consulting firm Neal Nelson &amp; Associates claims that AMD-based servers have beaten Intel in 36 of the 57 power efficiency tests it has conducted. The tests put an AMD Opteron-based server up against an Intel Xeon-based server.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - As Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) race toward smaller, faster chips, the fierce competition is taking its toll as both companies struggle to maintain profit margins by using more efficient manufacturing. At the tiny scale of 45-nanometer transistors and wires, a single speck of dust on a 300-millimeter silicon wafer can destroy an entire processor. Lower manufacturing yields cut into a company's profit margin, reducing the number of functional chips they can sell from each wafer. "As an industry, we're running out of gas at 45-nanometer geometry," said Nick Kepler, vice president of logic technology development for AMD. "We've been unable to scale the size as much as we used to because of leakage. We're still putting transistors closer together, but not shrinking the gates. So geometry shrinks can hurt you now, which they haven't in the past." One problem is that 65-nm and 45-nm chip components have shrunk so far that they are now smaller than the wavelength of the light used to carve those features onto silicon chips. To fight that trend,Â AMD and IBM Corp. said they will use three new technologies to boost manufacturing efficiency. By the second half of 2008, AMD expects to be producing 45-nm chips using immersion lithography, ultra-low-k interconnect dielectrics, and enhanced transistor strain. The companies made the announcement at the International Electron Device Meeting in San Francisco. By inserting liquid instead of air between the projection lens and the wafer, AMD and IBM can reduce the wavelength of the light, giving them a 40 percent gain in resolution compared to dry lithography and allowing them to sell a higher percentage of the hundreds of chips on every wafer, Kepler said. Likewise, IBM plans to produce 65-nm server chips by the second half of 2007, then shrink both server and gaming chips to 45-nm at some point in the future, said Gary Patton, vice president of technology development for IBM's semiconductor research and development center. AMD and IBM have cooperated on chip development since 2003, and last year extended their contract through 2011 to reach the 32-nm and 22-nm chip generations. In response, Intel says that it beat AMD to the market with 65-nm chip sales by more than a year, andÂ has already begun producing samples of its 45-nm "Penryn" quad-core chipÂ for notebooks, desktops and servers. Intel plans to ship those chips in the second half of 2007. Even if AMD improves its manufacturing, Intel is poised to continue its lead in shrinking chip geometries because it has shorter gate lengths and SRAM (static RAM) cell sizes, said Rob Willoner, a technology analyst with Intel's technology and manufacturing group. "People have different meanings when they talk about the 65-nm process. There's not an industry standard," he said. AMD's Opteron chip was a commercial success because its excellent design compensated for poor dimensions at the 90-nm scale, he said. Chips with a greater cache of local memory stored in SRAM cells can avoid the time-intensive process of retrieving data from external sources. At the same conference in San Francisco this week, Intel announced plans to use "floating-body cells" to further increase the amount of on-chip memory, according to published reports. Despite the manufacturing challenges, chip companies continue to build smaller features because of the tremendous performance benefits. By shrinking from 90 nm to 65 nm, Intel chips have double the transistor density while reducing leakage five-fold (at constant performance) and requiring 30 percent less switching power. Â
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For years, ATI played itself as the performance leader in the graphics space. But now as part of AMD, which is having a difficult time of late making its case for CPU performance, ATI may have to make like its new corporate parent for a little while.
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BusinessWeek Online - For 35 years, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.  stood in the shadow of archrival Intel Corp.  AMD churned out lower-priced clones of the tech leader's chips and occasionally enjoyed a hit that helped boost its meager profits. But bad times easily outweighed the good. Again and again, Intel used its manufacturing muscle and pricing power to stymie AMD's ambitions, preventing it from gaining a foothold in lucrative markets such as servers and corporate PCs.
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Paperwork delays slow AMD Intel and AMD have embraced a divide and propaganda approach to tout their upcoming server chips.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip. First described by Intel executivesÂ at a September trade show, the chip fits 80 cores onto a 275-square millimeter, fingernail-size chip and draws only 62 watts of power -- less than many modern desktop chips. The company has no plans to bring this "teraflops research chip" to market, but is using it to test new technologies such as high-bandwidth interconnects, energy management techniques, and a tile design method to build multicore chips, said Jerry Bautista, director of Intel's tera-scale research program. He spoke in a conference call with reporters on Friday before presenting technical details of the research at the ISSCC (Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference) trade show in San Francisco. Intel engineers are also using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, multimedia data mining, photo-realistic gaming and artificial intelligence. Until now, that degree of computing performance has been available only to scientists and academics using machines like ASCI Red, the teraflops supercomputer built by Intel and its partners in 1996 for U.S. government researchers at Sandia National Labs, near Albuquerque, New Mexico. That system handled a comparable amount of computing as the new chip, but demanded an enormous 500 kilowatts of power and 500 kilowatts of cooling to run its nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro chips. Shrunk onto a single chip, that power would allow average consumers to use their PCs in new ways. They could use improved search functions on the vast amounts of digital media stored on home desktops, searching large photo archives for specific attributes such as all the shots where a certain person is smiling, or where that person is posing with a friend, Bautista said. Running at 3.16GHz, the new chip achieves 1.01 teraflops of computation -- an efficiency of 16 gigaflops per watt. It can run even faster, but loses efficiency at higher speeds, performing at 1.63 teraflops at 5.1 GHz and 1.81 teraflops at 5.7 GHz. The processor saves power by shunting idle cores into sleep mode, then instantly turning them on as they're needed. Each modular tile has its own router built alongside the core, creating a "network on a chip." Despite using such an efficient grid, the researchers found they could actually hurt performance by adding too many cores. Performance scaled up directly from two cores to four, eight and 16. But they found that computing performance began to drop with 32 and 64 cores. "If we simply added more than 16 cores, we would get diminishing returns, because the threads and data traffic would not be used properly, so the cores get in the way of each other. It's like having too many cooks in the kitchen," said Bautista. To solve the problem on the new chip, they used a hardware-based thread scheduler and faster on-chip memory caches, optimizing the way data flows from memory into each core. To improve the design, Intel researchers plan to add a layer of "3D stacked memory" under the chip to minimize the time and power required to feed the cores with data. Next, they will create a mega-chip that uses general purpose cores instead of the floating-point units used in the current design.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Intel Corp.'s dual-core strategy for mobile processors became a little clearer this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, but questions remain about the company's plans for bringing dual-core designs to its desktop and low-end server chips.
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After Intel CEO Paul Otellini bragged that Intel&#39;s Xeon chip was the most energy-efficient processor, Neal Nelson compared it to AMD&#39;s offering and found that Intel wasn&#39;t being exactly truthful.Recent tests by Neal Nelson &amp; Associates, an independent computer performance consulting firm, have reported that in 36 of the 57 cases tested an AMD Opteron-based server delivered better power efficiency than a comparably configured Intel Xeon-based server.The tests were performed on servers configured with 2, 4, 6 and 8 gigabytes of main memory at various transaction processing load levels. The results show that for certain configurations and at certain load levels the Intel Xeon based server was 2.4 to 11.7 percent more power efficient while in other cases the AMD Opteron based server was 9.2 to 23.1 percent more power efficient. In addition, when the systems were idle and waiting for transactions to process, the AMD server was 30.4 to 53.1 percent more power efficient.Power consumption while the servers are idle is particularly significant since many servers spend most of their time waiting for work. A November 16, 2006 press release from IBM quotes a report by the Robert Frances Group which states that on average servers in data centers are idle 80 to 85 percent of the time.The test results also showed that:-- Larger memory configurations deliver both higher throughput and better power efficiency;-- Intel&#39;s power efficiency advantages decrease as memory size increases;-- AMD&#39;s power efficiency advantages increase as memory size increases;-- For CPU-intensive workloads, the Xeon delivers 8.0 to 14.0 percent higher peak throughput;-- For primarily I/O intensive workloads the Opteron delivers 11.3 to 19.4 percent higher peak throughputNeal Nelson conducted these tests in response to a statement made by Intel CEO Paul Otellini in a July 18, 2007 analyst conference call. During that call Mr Otellini referred to Intel&#39;s &quot;lead in power efficiency&quot;. Neal Nelson decided to use his company&#39;s benchmark toolset to determine if Intel actually had a lead in power efficiency.In a somewhat dry comment, Neal Nelson said: &quot;It appears that Mr. Otellini&#39;s statement is inconsistent with the test results.&quot;The tests were not financed or sponsored by any company or group.Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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U.S. consumers don't want to pay for low-power, high-performance chip.
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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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Advanced Micro Devices plans to demonstrate its version of a new approach to processor design on Tuesday, with a chip that is expected to offer faster computing and relatively less power consumption.
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Processors specially developed by Intel for&#160;Apple&#39;s new MacBook Air laptop&#160;will soon be used by other PC vendors in systems, possibly creating competition for what Apple calls the world&#39;s lightest and thinnest notebook.Two PC makers will use the miniaturized Intel Core 2 Duo processors used by Apple in MacBook Air, said a source familiar with Intel&#39;s plans. Systems powered by the chips will be released soon, the source said.The companies&#39; names weren&#39;t revealed, but the chip could bring smaller and lighter notebooks that could compete in size and performance with the ultra-thin MacBook Air, which weighs 3 pounds (1.3 kilograms) and measures 0.16 inches (0.4 centimeters) at its thinnest part and 0.76 inches (1.93 cms) at its thickest part.Apple asked Intel to develop powerful chips for MacBook Air that are 60 percent smaller than the normal size, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during a keynote address at the Macworld Conference and Expo earlier this month. Intel obliged, which led to the development of smaller Core 2 Duo processors.&quot;All you have to do is check out the size and shape of the MacBook Air to see what the shrink enables -- smaller, lighter form factors that were physically not possible before,&quot; said Connie Brown, an Intel spokeswoman.The MacBook Air comes with miniaturized Intel Core 2 Duo processors running at either 1.6Ghz or 1.8GHz, with the Intel 965GMS chip set and integrated graphics. Manufactured using the 65-nanometer process, the chips belong to Intel&#39;s Merom family of processors.Intel shrunk the CPU and chip set for a 60 percent reduction in total footprint to comparable Merom processors, Brown said. While delivering similar performance, the chips use 20 watts of power, lower than comparable Merom chips that use 35 watts.The miniaturized chip was designed for Apple, but other PC makers can use it, Brown said.PC manufacturers could adopt the miniaturized Merom CPU in mini desktops or subnotebooks, but the Mac OS X Leopard operating system gives MacBook Air an advantage, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64. Other systems could be based on Windows or Linux.Apple also has a leg up in product design, which potential MacBook Air competitors will find hard to emulate, Brookwood said.&quot;What has resulted from Apple&#39;s move to Intel chips is its forcing other OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] to pay more attention to the styling of their systems, which is clearly an advantage for users,&quot; Brookwood said.This was the first time Intel developed a small form-factor chip from a normal-sized mobile processor, Brown said.However, Intel has talked about developing chips with smaller form factors in the past.At the Intel Developer Forum last year, Intel talked about shrinking the size of chips by up to 60 percent for its next-generation Montevina mobile platform, which will include the new Penryn processors manufactured using the 45-nm process. The small form-factor chips will be released shortly after the normal-sized chips, due to ship by the middle of this year.It&#39;s not a coincidence that both Intel and Apple have talked about a 60 percent size reduction in chips, Brookwood said. Apple has taken a step ahead by adopting the Merom processor for the MacBook Air, and a natural path of progression is to upgrade to the small form-factor Penryn processors that will be part of Montevina, he said.Apple doesn&#39;t comment on future products, a company spokesman wrote in an e-mail.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices is undaunted by rival Intelâs recent headline-grabbing announcements of 45-nm (nanometer) processing technology and a deal to supply Xeon chips to Sun Microsystems. Interviewed at the DesignCon 2007 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., last week, Steve Polzin, chief platform architect in the Computation Products Group at AMD, said his company would, in time, also use 45-nm manufacturing technology through its alliances with Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. âWe have access to very similar technology that weâll be able to use in 45-nm,â Polzin said. âItâs a weapon in our arsenal.â Intel sent tremors through the hypercompetitive chip market last week when it made good on promises to begin producing 45-nm chips by the second half of this year. More concerning for AMD, Intel said the new chips would consume less energy and generate less heat than existing chips, thanks to a new material dubbed âhigh-kâ that is used in the insulating material for transistors. Polzin would not commit on a time frame for when AMD would use 45-nm, except to say that the company would do so âwhen it makes sense.â AMD currently uses 65-nm processing technology in its Opteron CPU line. âPushing technology for technologyâs sake is not what we do,â Polzin said. The 45-nm technology will be applicable from systems ranging from laptops to datacenters, he said. Intel does not have a big jump on AMD, said analyst Mary Olsson of Gary Smith EDA, and 45-nm systems will not be heavily used for three to four years. As for Sunâs deal to use Intel CPUs after having relied on only AMD for x86 chips, Polzin said the arrangement was not unexpected, with Intel now leveraging AMD-championed technology in Xeon. âWe knew that one of the key factors that attracted Sun to AMD was the 64-bit extensions to x86,â Polzin said. âAMD64 is great technology. Intel decided to copy it, so what the heck.â Sun, as an AMD customer, is free to choose whichever suppliers it wants, Polzin said, adding that Sun is one of its âvery valued customersâ and that the companies still work closely. At the conference, Polzin cited the evolution of processors, which have grown from 16-bit to 32-bit and 64-bit units. Multicore processors also have arrived, he noted. The company plans its quad-processor Opteron offerings for a midyear release. Eight-core chips are on the drawing board as well. In 2009, the company plans to offer graphics processors and CPUs on the same chip as part of its Fusion initiative. This technology will be offered in the mobile Turion chip, Polzin said.
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AMD provides a sneak peek at how its pending quad-core chip will improve performance and save energy.
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Processors will feature enhanced power management technology.
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If canceling the Pentium-4 4GHz processor was not enough, AMD has come up with fresher set of problems for Intel. Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices renewed the claims of being the maker of the fastest PC Microprocessors
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has pumped up the performance of its Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor and cooled down two single-core Athlon 64 processors. The top-of-the-range AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor is now the 6000+, with a clock speed of 3GHz and 2MB of L2 cache. It sells for $464 in quantities of 1,000 or more. The previous fastest model, the 5600+ with a clock speed of 2.8GHz, now sells for $326 in quantities of 1,000 or more. With its high-performance dual-core systems, AMD hopes to profit from the introduction of Microsoft's new operating system Windows Vista, which places greater demands on computing hardware. There's no speed boost for the single-core Athlon 64 processor, but AMD is now manufacturing the 3500+ and 3800+ models using a 65-nanometer production process, reducing the chips' die-size and energy consumption while offering the same computing performance. The latest versions consume 45 watts, compared to 62 watts for the previous generation, in which the smallest features etched on the chips had a spacing of 90nm. The 3500+ sells for $88 in quantities of 1,000 or more, and the 3800+ for $93. The faster dual-core chips will appeal primarily to gaming enthusiasts, and will appear shortly in PCs from Alienware and Voodoo, the gaming PC divisions of Dell and Hewlett-Packard, respectively, said AMD. Fujitsu Siemens Computers (Holding) will use the lower-power processors in its Esprimo enterprise desktop range, which it promotes as an energy-efficient range, the company said. Two weeks ago, AMDÂ introduced new dual-core Opteron processorsÂ for servers that are either faster or consume less power than previous chips. While AMD had begun to pull ahead in the market for low-power server and desktop chips, IntelÂ is fighting back. Last month,Â Intel persuaded Sun MicrosystemsÂ to use its Xeon processors in future servers and workstations based on the x86 architecture. Sun had only used AMD chips in those machines in recent years, and will now use chips from both manufacturers. At the top of the scale, Intel took the lead in the market for quad-core server chips last November, with the launch of its Xeon 5300 series, previously known as Clovertown. AMD won't introduce its range of energy-efficient quad-core server processors, code-named Barcelona, until the middle of this year.