AMD confirms launch date for “Barcelona” processors

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the leading global provider of innovative microprocessor solutions for computing, communications and consumer electronics markets, on Friday announced its plans to launch two versions of its third-generation of AMD Opteron processors, developed under the codename “Barcelona”, in August.

The upcoming “Barcelona” processors will be available in both standard and low power versions at the time of launch, bringing enhanced performance and lower power consumption to enterprise datacenter deployments.

A standard model consumes 95 watts of power and a lower-power edition operates at 65 watts. The clock speed of the quad-core processors will range up to 2 GHz in the standard devices, while it will be 100 MHz to 200 MHz slower in the reduced-power chips.

AMD said the new Barcelona quad-core Opteron x86 processors are likely to increase performance up to 70% on certain database applications and up to 40% on certain floating point applications. The chipmaker also expected that its higher-frequency processors would significantly help boost the performance advantage.

“More than ever before, customers are expecting energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt leadership as much as absolute performance. With this new reality of computing, greater performance at the expense of greater power consumption is no longer an option,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division at AMD.

“AMD has prioritized production of our low power and standard power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen.”

AMD touts its upcoming processors as the first ‘genuine’ quad core, unlike their competitors in the processor rat race which has two dual-cores stitched together. AMD says that they are the proud producers of the first ‘genuine’ quad core because their processor has one physical die with four physical processors with four separate caches all interconnected and operating as a quad-core processor.

"With our upcoming quad-core processors, we have a feature that will provide improved performance for virtualization. As customers are consolidating servers down to fewer platforms using virtualization, quad-core will give them much better memory access, which is critical to consolidation," said John Fruehe, division manager for the server and workstation group at AMD.

The chips are manufactured on 65-nanometer silicon-on-insulator process technology.

AMD first showcased its native quad core processor at its annual Industry Analyst Forum in Berkeley, California.

According to the Sunnyvale, California based-AMD, users who are running servers with dual-core Opteron chips will be able to easily move to the quad-core devices because its quad-core chip features the same socket, same chipsets and same thermal envelopes as the dual-core chips.

Advanced Micro Devices is the world's second-largest maker of personal-computer processors, behind Intel. The company was founded in 1969 by a group of former executives from Fairchild Semiconductor, including Jerry Sanders III, Ed Turney, John Carey, Sven Simonsen, Jack Gifford and three members from Gifford's team, Frank Botte, Jim Giles and Larry Stenger.

AMD is also the world's second-largest supplier of x86 based processors, the largest supplier of discrete graphics products as a result of the merger with ATI Technologies in 2006, and owns a 37 percent share of Spansion, a supplier of non-volatile flash memory.

AMD’s quad-core chips would hit the market nine months after Intel Corp. released versions of its Xeon server chips with four processor cores.

Intel, which has lost more than 5 percent (as of January 2007) of the overall computer chip market to its archrival AMD, is still the world's largest computer chip maker. It began losing the market share several years ago as customers began attracted to AMD-designed chips that were seen as more energy-efficient.

In order to regain the market share and reverse the plunging profit, last year, Intel rolled out a new line of chips based on an upgraded design that industry observers cheered for delivering higher performance while giving off less heat.