AMD hopes Barcelona demos whet IT's appetite
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The quad-core server chip won't appear until later this year, but AMD's trying to show potential customers the chips are up and running.
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SAN FRANCISCO - After years of holding meetings with analysts and media at rival Intel's biannual developer conferences, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) plans to host its own developer conference this year in the U.S.
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InfoWorld - Server makers are showing their first systems based on Advanced Micro Devices&#39;&#160;upcoming quad-core Opteron chip, known as Barcelona.
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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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Barcelona: 'It could have been a contender' Exclusive Intel looks set to blunt AMD's August Barcelona processor release by handing customers a 2.0GHz version of its four-core Clovertown, The Register has learned.â¦
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What will the future hold for AMD?
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market from its rival Intel Corp. on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor.
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Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) has developed a low-power chip that it thinks will make portable video players more compelling by reducing the time needed to transfer content to the devices. The company is expected to announce the chip at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Monday.
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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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Somehow, Intel has skillfully avoided use of the metaphor "two-by-four" to represent its latest ultra-high-end CPU platform rollout this morning at GDC in San Francisco. But AMD might be feeling like it's been hit by one.
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InfoWorld - AMD will delay its launch of the Barcelona quad-core Opteron server chip from its expected date in July until October, setting the company back in its effort to compete with new processors from Intel, according to analyst reports.
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(InfoWorld) - After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices' latest processor, a quad-core server chip calledÂ Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the marketÂ Monday. The stakes surrounding the release of Barcelona, officially called Quad-Core Opteron, are high. AMD lost ground in the server-chip market toÂ rival IntelÂ in recent quarters and is counting on the new processor to reverse its fortunes. That won't be easy. While AMD struggled to get the Quad-Core Opteron out of its factories,Â Intel shipped newer, faster processorsÂ expected to compete more closely with the new chip, particularly in the market for high-end servers with four or more processors. Nevertheless, AMD is counting on technical differences between its quad-core chips and those from Intel to offer better performance while consuming less power. Nine versions of theÂ Quad-Core OpteronÂ will be available from Monday, all manufactured using a 65nm process. These are the first quad-core chips from AMD and the first server chips from the company made using this technology. Previous server chips were made using a 90nm process. "We used this opportunity as we move from 90 nanometers (nm) to 65nm to redesign the processor, to be able to optimize and get more efficiency out of it," said John Fruehe, AMD's worldwide business development manager for servers and workstations. At the high end of the Quad-Core Opteron lineup are chips designed for servers with four or more processors. The 2GHz 8350 has a thermal design power (TDP) of 95 watts and is priced at $1,019 in 1,000-unit quantities, a standard measure of processor pricing. TDP does not indicate the amount of power that a processor consumes, rather it describes the maximum amount of heat that server makers must be able to dissipate from the chip in extreme circumstances. The second Quad-Core Opteron designed for multi-chip servers is the 8347, which runs at 1.9GHz and has a 95-watt TDP. The chip is priced at $786. The range of multi-chip servers also includes two models with a lower TDP, the 8347HE and 8346HE. With a TDP of 68 watts, these chips run at clock speeds of 1.9GHz and 1.8GHz, respectively. They are priced at $873 and $698. All of the Quad-Core Opteron chips have 512KB of level two cache per processor core, and 2MB of level three cache shared by the four cores. Five versions of the Quad-Core Opteron will be available for servers with one or two processors. The Quad-Core Opteron 2350 and 2347 run at speeds of 2GHz and 1.9GHz and have a TDP of 95 watts. The chips are priced at $389 and $316, respectively. The 1.9GHz 2347HE, 1.8GHz 2346HE, and 1.7GHz 2344HE have a lower TDP, at 68 watts. The chips will cost $377, $255, and $209. AMD said the new chips are faster than previous Opterons, with a 2GHz Quad-Core Opteron running 79 percent faster than a 3GHz dual-core Opteron. Five single-core Opteron processors are required to match the performance of a single Quad-Core Opteron, the company said. The Quad-Core Opteron has four processor cores on a silicon chip that also includes a memory controller hub and high-speed HyperTransport links. By comparison, Intel's quad-core processors have two dual-core silicon chips inside a multi-chip package that does not include the memory controller. AMD has added new features to the Quad-Core Opteron designed to boost the chip's performance and lower power consumption relative to earlier Opteron chips. For example, each of the Quad-Core Opteron's processors and the memory controller have independent power supplies, which allows them to run at different clock speeds and reduce power consumption when they don't need to run at full speed. "You're most likely going to have a quad-core processor with four different speeds because you've got four different utilization levels at any time," Fruehe said. The chip maker also added a 128-bit floating point unit to the Quad-Core Opteron to boost performance for certain types of applications. At the same time AMD will announce the availability of the Quad-Core Opteron, the company plans to say more than 50 systems based on the chips are now available from vendors like Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell, among others. If servers based on the Quad-Core Opteron chips turn out to be faster and more energy efficient than systems based on Intel's offerings, that edge may not last long. In November, Intel plans to refresh the bulk of its server chip lineup with a new family called Penryn. The Penryn server chips will be made using a 45-nm process and will have more memory cache than Intel's existing server chips, giving them a boost in performance. "We have a significant lead today and we believe we will have that lead with Clovertown, and once we have Harpertown with 45-nm we will extend that lead further," said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group, referring to code names for Intel's current and upcoming quad-core processors designed for two-way servers. Later this year, AMD expects to release Quad-Core Opteron chips that run faster than the versions set to be announced Monday. One of those processors is a 2.3GHz Quad-Core Opteron SE designed for high-performance computers, set for release during the fourth quarter. AMD plans to offer faster versions of the standard Quad-Core Opteron chips during the fourth quarter, with faster versions of the low-power HE chips due during the fourth quarter of 2007 or the first quarter of 2008. Â
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Powerful processor will target high-end desktop PCs in an effort to stay ahead of AMD.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. announced delivery of its quad core processor, Barcelona.  It also said 15,000 Barcelona processors will be used in one of the world's largest supercomputers now being built at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
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After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.&#39;s latest processor, a quad-core server chip called Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the market Monday.
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Some of the first servers based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc.&#39;s (AMD&#39;s) upcoming Barcelona quad-core chip are on display at Computex, but details of the chips are being kept tightly under wraps.
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After 'Barcelona', 'Shanghai' AMD will release 'Shanghai', an "enhanced" version of its recently demo'd 'Barcelona' quad-core Opteron processor family, early on in 2008, the chip maker revealed yesterday when it published a server roadmap that was also notable for the absence of FB-DIMM technology and, indeed, DDR 3.â¦