The day after Intel slashed its guidance and told the press that “orders just died,” AMD, a company laboring under a really bad karma, said it’s started selling Shanghai, its first 45nm quad-core Opteron chip, a few months earlier than expected and plunk in the middle of an economic apocalypse.
AMD, which is also trying to split itself into two parts, one manufacturing, one design, expects OEMs including IBM, Sun, HP and Dell to field 25 Shanghai-bearing server systems between now and the end of the year. The question is will anybody be left to buy them?
The part, bound for two-, four- and eight-socket x86 servers, is supposed to deliver up to 35% more performance and require up to 35% percent less power at idle than AMD’s star-crossed Barcelona chip whose introduction was badly flubbed as well as quarters late.
Intel of course has had 45nm server and PC parts for about a year now and is supposed to launch the first three Core i7 desktop chips built with its shiny new Nehalem microarchitecture and its AMD-borrowed on-chip memory controller first thing next week.
AMD however should have the initial advantage with MP systems. After Intel gets its Nehalem server chips out next year all bets are off.
AMD also said Thursday that it would have a 45nm desktop chip code named Dragon out in Q1 that fuses ATI Radeon HD 4000 graphics on a new 45nm AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core processor.
AMD, which desperately needs to increase its dwarf-like market share, claims Shanghai is the cat’s pajamas at virtualization with up to a 40% increase in virtualization performance.
It’s supposed to deliver faster “world switch” time, which enhances virtual machine efficiency and improve Rapid Virtualization Indexing. Seems the company tinkered with AMD-V to reduce the overhead associated with software virtualization.
It also achieved a 200% increase in the thing’s 6MB Level 3 cache size which should tickle memory-intensive applications like virtualization, database and Java.
AMD is delivering nine chips now ranging from 2.3GHz-2.7 GHz at 75W, with HE (55W) and SE (105W) processors to follow in Q1.
There are five Opteron 2000 series chips (2.3GHz-2.7GHz) and four Opteron 8000 series chips (2.4GHz -2.7GHz), all socket-compatible with and priced against the Barcelona. The widgets start at $377 and go to $2,149.
About Maureen O'Gara Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara
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The day after Intel slashed its guidance and told the press that “orders just died,” AMD, a company laboring under a really bad karma, said it’s started selling Shanghai, its first 45nm quad-core Opteron chip, a few months earlier than expected and plunk in the middle of an economic apocalypse.
