Former Dire Straits Front Man Uses AMD Opteron for New Album
674617
Mark Knopfler, the former lead guitarist and singer for Dire Straits, has recorded his new &quot;Shangri-La&quot; album on a dual AMD Opteron processor-based digital audio workstation.
328682
New high-end dual-core Opterons will power servers.
512501
AMD Opteron servers prove more power-efficient than Xeon-powered servers in tests.
616081
(InfoWorld) - Newly released processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel will reinvigorate the market for high-end servers, according to one server analyst. The biggest impact ofÂ Intel's recently released Xeon 7300 chips, known as Tigerton, andÂ AMD's just-launched Quad-Core Opteron processor, called Barcelona, will be felt in the market for high-end servers with four processors, called 4P systems, said Rajnish Arora, research director for servers and workstations at IDC Asia-Pacific. The 4P market has lagged in recent months because two-way, or 2P, servers based on quad-core processors from Intel offered the same number of cores as 4P systems using dual-core chips from Intel and AMD. But that is set to change with the release of the Xeon 7300 and Quad-Core Opteron. "Both Tigerton and Barcelona will reinvigorate the 4P market," Arora said. The Xeon 7300 and Quad-Core Opteron are the first quad-core x86 processors designed for 4P systems. Previously, both Intel and AMD offered only dual-core processors for this segment of the market. The introduction of these chips allows server makers to build systems with a total of 16 cores in four processors, double the amount of cores that was previously possible. "It's a very powerful, scalable platform now," he said. The increased processing power of these systems will allow users to consolidate their x86 servers, since fewer servers can offer more performance. "They are far more powerful than 4P servers sold two years ago," Arora said. While fewer servers are required, the prices of servers will start to rise as users demand systems with more memory to handle virtualization workloads. "Companies are looking for more richly configured systems," he said. IDC is owned by International Data Group, the parent company of IDG News Service.
680623
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.
185398
Updated Two pints of lager and the latest White Stripes single, please
213460
Who's best for games - and Windows Vista? Head-to-Head Make no mistake about it, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor struggles to compete with Intel's Core 2 Duo, and the upcoming four-core Core 2 Quad will move the goalposts even further away. Which gives AMD a major problem until it starts to roll out Athlon 64 X4 mid-2007. Meanwhile, it canât rely on sales of mobile processors as that sector is owned by Centrino and it must surely be worried about Opteronâs position as Intel spreads its Core technology into servers.â¦
639835
(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
35068
Sun to follow? Exclusive AMD has secured yet another major partner win thanks to Opteron. Starting with the Power7 processor, IBM will give up on making its own Unix/RISC box motherboards. Instead, it will plug the Power chips directly into slightly modified Opteron boards in an effort to save money.â¦
208153
Preps pair of Octals Entire computing platforms have come and gone* in the time that it has taken AMD to shove the four-core version of Opteron known as Barcelona into end customers' hands.â¦
21581
Company puts on a demonstration of promised 'Barcelona' quad-core Opteron chip.
241434
IBM on Thursday unveiled its second Advanced Micro Devices Opteron-based server, which the company hopes is ready for when AMD releases its dual-core processors.
585920
(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. Processor companies make more money selling server chips than desktop or laptop chips, so the move will hit AMD's 2007 earnings hard, pushing the company to lose $2.59 per share instead of only $2.48 per share, according to a report released Tuesday by Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung. "Barcelona is generally viewed to beÂ AMD's best opportunity to stem server share loss to Intel. While AMD's recent notebook win at Toshiba may balance any negative revenue implications to our current model, Barcelona's delay has negative implications for AMD's gross margin," Yeung wrote. His estimate is a larger loss than the consensus Thomson Financial forecast that AMD will lose $2.47 per share for 2007. The news comes at a bad time for AMD, which has promised for months that it would launch the chip in the second half of 2007,Â helping the company to rebound from the effects of a price war with Intel. AMD is already hurting,Â posting a $611 million first-quarter lossÂ in April, following on the heels of theÂ $574 million loss reported in JanuaryÂ for fourth quarter earnings last year. Barcelona is the key to taking that fiscal burden off AMD's shoulders,Â AMD CEO Hector Ruiz said on May 3 at the company's annual shareholder meeting. Although Intel is several quarters ahead in improving its chip manufacturing capabilities, AMD stays competitive by creating more innovative designs, he said. AMD claims Barcelona will deliver better performance on memory-intensive applications than Intel's Clovertown quad-core Xeon server chips that have been on the market since November. AMD stuck to its guns on Wednesday, insisting that it is still on schedule, and pointing as evidence to itsÂ demonstration on Tuesday of prototype Barcelona chips in serversÂ from infrastructure partners Supermicro Computer, Tyan Computer, and Uniwide Technologies at theÂ Computex trade show in Taipei. "We remain on track for a summer 2007 launch with partners shipping platforms in the third quarter," said AMD spokeswoman Marian Kelley. She blamed the delay rumors on Cray's announcement Monday that it expects revenue to drop because of a delay in shipping its quad-core Cray XT4 systems. In fact, Cray was referring to AMD's midrange Budapest processor, not Barcelona, she said. "The guidance that we've been giving and that we're sticking to is that Budapest will follow Barcelona in the second half of 2007," Kelley said. Despite AMD's assurances, other analysts echoed the Citigroup report, saying they have heard similar news from server vendors, distributors and board makers. On May 30, another report called AMD's promise to launch Barcelona in mid-2007 "a head fake" since the chip will not be available at full volume until August at the earliest, according to a note from analyst Patrick Wang at Thomas Weisel Partners. In contrast, Intel is expected to succeed in shipping its Penryn processors in the late third quarter or early fourth quarter. That timing will allow Intel to essentially catch up to AMD and soften the blow of losing sales to customers who see a performance advantage in Barcelona, Wang said.
528587
IBM has given AMD&#39;s recently announced dual-core Opteron microprocessor its stamp of approval, announcing that in mid-2005 it will ship a version of its e326 server equipped with the chips.
412646
The fact that AMD plans to unveil its quad-core Opteron server processor on Monday is the worst kept secret since rumors yesterday that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would unveil something having to do with iPods today. What has come as a surprise is that Intel decided not to wait to let AMD have its day before releasing some initial specifications for its forthcoming "Tigerton" class Xeon MP quad-core server processors.
374795
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) showcased its dual-core x86 Opteron microprocessor this week. The upcoming dual-core CPU for the enterprise enviornment is expected to debut in mid-2005 and was housed in a HP ProLiant DL585 server.
259696
Heâs not only the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for megaband Fall Out Boy. Patrick Stump is also one of the most prolific composers in pop music. And he composes that music all over the world using his MacBook Pro and GarageBand.  âThe beauty of GarageBand is that itâs only limited by what you want to do with it,â he says. âUltimately, you can do anything. Itâs a sequencer and you can record and edit audio. And it runs on my laptop. Iâve composed and recorded on the plane, on the bullet train in Japan. Itâs made me so much more prolific because I donât have to think about where and when I can record or write music. I can do it anywhere.â