May 13, 2008
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The first enterprise systems running Advanced Micro Devices' new quad-core Barcelona CPUs hit the market in
late April.
Pushing the delayed chips out into the market has given AMD a boost in what has been a lagging competition with
rival Intel.
Kevin Knox, vice president of AMD's commercial business, said that a series of hardware vendors, including
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Dell will be launching Barcelona-based servers between now and the
end of the second quarter.
HP has announced on April 21 that its largest x86 server yet -- the eight-socket ProLiant DL-785 is equipped
with quad-core Barcelona chips and that it will ship later this month. With eight sockets and quad-core chips,
that means the server will be running 32 cores.
"We're pretty excited about that because it opens us up to a market we hadn't played heavily in before,"
said Knox, acknowledging that Barcelona is four to six months late because of a bug that was discovered in the
chip's Transition Lookaside Buffer (TLB).
"If you take a step back, this was a problem we discovered in a high-stress environment inside our labs. Delaying it
was the right thing to do, the responsible thing to do."
Knox said the problems with Barcelona ended up as a big learning experience for AMD - one that will benefit
its work on upcoming processors.
"We've had a lot of learnings from what we went through with Barcelona," he added. "We learned things about
stress testing and working to figure out problems earlier in the processes. It pointed us to potential areas where
there could be issues.
The glitch was around TLBs and that has a big impact on virtualization. The B2 has given us pretty strong
learnings. We're actually feeling pretty good with the learnings from B2 and we're on track with B3."
Knox also said that Shanghai, the next version of Opteron, is on track for release in the second half of 2008.
Shanghai will mark AMD's first move from a 65 nanometer manufacturing process to 45nm process. Intel moved to
the 45nm process in November 2007 with the Penryn family of processors.
Overall, AMD's 45nm production is being done in its Fab 36 plant in Dresden, Germany. The new chips, code-named
Shanghai for the server version and Deneb for the desktop, have already shipped to a select list of customers,
Garry Silcott, a spokesman for AMD, said in an interview earlier this month.
Knox also said since there isn't a lot of software geared to take full advantage of four-cores yet, he's
not too worried about their rival coming out with six at this point.
"Six cores is interesting," he noted. "Again, I'm not convinced there's a gigantic market of applications
that want to exploit that number. We still believe we're going to be extremely competitive. When you look at
the architecture apps we've done, like hyper transport, that will make us extremely competitive, added to the
fact that we'll have quad-core to compete against quad-core."
Since Intel has been adding to its Penryn family of 45nm chips over the past several months, one analyst noted
that it will be important for AMD to release its 45nm as soon as possible, analysts say.
"It's late, but it's not too late for AMD to come out with 45nm chips," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel
Consulting Group Inc., said in a previous interview.
Olds added "the degree to which these chips can compete with Intel
depends on whether 'second half 08' means July or late December... If we're talking July, then this might allow
them to pull back to parity with current Intel products. If we're talking December, then they're still
firmly behind Intel."
"We want to get it out as quickly as possible," he added. "We want to get it right, though, more than we want to
get it out quickly."
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Source: American Micro Devices.
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