All Things News

Straight from Slashdot: “In their latest round of energy-efficiency tests between AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon, independent testing firm Neal Nelson and Associates find AMD still holds an edge, but it’s certainly not cut-and-dried. Nelson put similarly equipped servers through another gauntlet of tests, swapping in different amounts of memory and varying transaction loads. In the end, he found that the more memory he installed on the servers, the better the Opteron performed compared to the Xeon. Additionally, at maximum throughput, the Intel system fared better, power-efficiency-wise, by 5.0 to 5.5 percent for calculation intensive workloads. For disk I/O intensive workloads, AMD delivered better power efficiency by 18.4 to 18.6 percent. And in idle states — that is, when servers were waiting for their next work load — AMD consistently creamed Intel.”

Straight from Slashdot: “AMD hosted a small gathering in the Penthouse at the SoHo Grand Hotel in New York City yesterday to demo some products due to be released in the coming months. HotHardware attended the event and snapped some photos of the various demo stations. The shots and info regarding the AMD quad-core Phenom-powered system running John Woo’s Stranglehold (Unreal 3.0 engine) will be of interest, as will the slick notebooks, HTPCs, and hand-held devices, like the HTC Advantage 7501. It’s essentially a cross between a UMPC, Phone, PDA, and portable GPS. The device features and AMD Imageon processor, 8GB of flash memory, a 5″ touch screen, and a built in magnetic QWERTY keyboard, GPS navigator and 3MP camera.”

Straight from Cnet News: “Advanced Micro Devices in August will begin selling its quad-core “Barcelona” Opteron processors, models that answer Intel’s current products but soon will face stiffer competition.

The first Barcelona models, formally called Quad-Core Opteron, will run at clock frequencies up to 2GHz and will be available in standard and low-power versions. Faster models, both of the standard and more power-hungry special-edition ilk, will arrive in the fourth quarter, the company said. The first servers using the chips will come in September. “

Digg Comments

Straight from Ars Technica: “2007 has not been kind to AMD. The company saw its workstation market share slip, has taken on $2 billion of new debt, lost almost $1.2 billion over the past two quarters, has been unable to close the gap with Intel when it comes to CPU performance, and has been the subject of recent rumors that Barcelona will be delayed. AMD has been in cost-cutting mode for the past several months and, according to IDG News Service, is considering getting out of the fabrication business. Currently, AMD operates two fabs: Fab 30 and Fab 36. Fab 30 is in the process of being fitted to handle 300mm production, and when the transition is complete, it will be rechristened Fab 38. It hasn’t come cheaply, either—the chip maker has invested over $2.5 billion to expand its 300mm capabilities. AMD has also been talking up a new 45nm plant in Malta, NY, that would come online in 2009.

Speculation is building in the analyst community that AMD will attempt to further cut costs by outsourcing more—or all—of its chip making as early as 2008. One Citigroup analyst is predicting a “transformational move” that would result in AMD’s lower-end CPUs being manufactured by a third party and possibly selling off part or all of its Dresden, Germany facility. Another report from Goldman Sachs outlines the investment firm’s belief that the company will leave manufacturing completely in the hands of third parties.”

Straight from Slashdot: “InformationWeek has uncovered some documentation which provides some details amid today’s hype for AMD’s announcement of its upcoming Phenom quad-core (previously code-named Agena). AMD’s 10h architecture will be used in both the desktop Phenom and the Barcelona (Opteron) quads. The architecture supports wider floating-point units, can fully retire three long instructions per cycle, and has virtual machine optimizations. While the design is solid, Intel will still be first to market with 45nm quads (the first AMD’s will be 65nm). Do you think this architecture will help AMD regain the lead in its multicore battle with Intel?”

Straight from Ars Technica: “The HD 2600 was today’s high-profile announcement from AMD, but it wasn’t the only bit of news coming from the company. The CPU and GPU maker also announced today that its new dual-core and quad-core consumer and enthusiast CPUs will be known as the Phenom. The quad-core Phenom FX and Phenom X4 will appear during the second half of 2007, while a dual-core Phenom X2 will show up after the quad-core models ship. Previously known by the code name Agena, Phenom CPUs will feature an on-die integrated DDR2 memory controller, shared L3 cache, and a HyperTransport link on-die. AMD takes a subtle dig at Intel’s quad-core CPUs, saying that its use of on-die HyperTransport removes a “bottleneck inherent in other products that are packaging two dual-core chips to form quad-core processors.”

Phenom CPUs will come in Socket AM2 and Socket AM2+ flavors, which means that they should be drop-in replacement for owners of Socket AM2 systems. In 2008, AMD will introduce Socket AM3, which will have on-die DDR3 controllers and support the company’s 45nm CPUs.”

Straight from Slashdot: “AMD disclosed a few details today regarding their upcoming mobile platform technologies, codenamed ‘Griffin’ and ‘Puma’. According to AMD, Griffin will be manufactured at 65nm and it will feature a new mobile optimized on-die Northbridge with a power optimized DDR2 memory controller, HyperTransport 3 connectivity, and larger L2 caches than current designs. The new memory controller should also extend battery life thanks to new power saving features, that allow the controller to operate on a separate power plane and at a lower voltage than the execution cores.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Remember how AMD said they’d make use of ATI’s GPU technology to make better technology? Well, not all change is progress. InfoWorld’s Tom Yager reports that AMD plans to block access to the framebuffer in hardware to help enforce DRM schemes, such as allowing more restricted playback of Sony Blu-Ray disks. They can pry my Print Screen key from my cold, dead fingers.”

Straight from Info World: “AMD’s next-generation processor line, code-named Torrenza, has gone from a block diagram to living, breathing silicon. The first incarnation of AMD’s redesigned x86 CPU is Barcelona, that which your non-co-readers will call quad-core Opteron. Barcelona is genius, a genuinely new CPU that frees itself entirely of the millstone of the Pentium legacy. It’ll do the same for you.”

Digg Comments

Straight from Slashdot: “AMD has showcased their new 65nm Barcelona quad-core CPU. It is labeled a quad-core Opteron, but according to Infoworld’s Tom Yeager, is really a redefinition of x86. Each core has a new vector math processing unit (SSE128), separate integer and floating point schedulers, and new nested paging tables (to vastly improve hardware virtualization). According to AMD, the new vector math units alone should improve floating point operation by 80%. Some analysts are skeptical, waiting for benchmarks. Will AMD dethrone Intel again? Only time will tell.”

Straight from Engadget: “With as much AMD fanfare as there was leading up to this release, you’d think they would’ve managed to drum up a bit better showing. After running up against a battery of benchmark tests, AMD’s Quad FX dual CPU platform has been throughly trounced by Intel’s QX6700 2.66GHz processor. While things looks great on paper for AMD, with exciting amounts of bandwidth between the two processors, and dedicated memory for each chip, in practice the Quad FX platform is an utter power hog (double that of the QX6700), and only squeezed by Intel in a handful of tests, while for the most part racking up loss after loss, trailing from 10 to 40 percent behind the Intel’s 65nm quad-core chip. Price is also a concern, since even though AMD is pricing the actual chips aggressively, you’ll still have to spring around $480 for the only motherboard that can handle ‘em, and those 1000W power supplies don’t really come cheap. Of course, AMD does have 65nm chips on the way, which should do better against Intel on a clock-to-clock basis, and Windows Vista will include lots of mult-thread enhancements to “even the playing field,” but there’s still no denying that AMD got spanked in this round, and we don’t suppose Intel will just be sitting around while AMD plays catch up.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “AMD’s new processor is a bona fide quad-core part, with all four cores integrated onto a single die and sharing a 2MB on-die L3. Each core has private 512KB L2 and a 64KB L1 caches. In contrast, Intel’s quad-core Kentsfield part is a dual-chip module (DCM), where two Core 2 Duo dies are sandwiched together and put into the same package without sharing a cache. K8L’s floating-point and SSE units are now 128-bits wide, so AMD can now offer single-cycle throughput for 128-bit computation.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Dell Computer has announced that it is rolling out four new desktop models and expanding its line of Dimension products. The new models include a slim consumer tower called the C521, notable for its use of an AMD processor. While Dell has released servers with AMD processors in their consumer computers earlier this year, this is the first time that they have offered AMD chips in their consumer products. The C521 line uses AMD Athlon 64 in both single and dual-core (X2) configurations. The other new models use Intel Core 2 Duo chips.”

Straight from Slashdot: “ExtremeTech has an extensive performance roundup across the entire line of Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD AM2 CPUs, from the cheap to the ultra-high end. Both companies bring five processors to the table, ranging from $152 to $1,075, with the mid-range CPUs boasting the best in price/performance. From the article: ‘It’s clear that Intel’s Core 2 Duo lineup offers superior performance across the product line when compared with AMD’s Athlon 64. In some applications, even a lower-cost Core 2 Duo can outperform some of the higher-end Athlon 64s.’”

Straight from Ars Technica: “The once-committed relationship that Dell has had with Intel throughout much of the former’s history continues to break down, with the recent admission that the PC manufacturer will begin offering AMD Sempron and Turion processors in consumer notebooks this fall.It seems like only last year that Dell was standing firmly by Intel’s side as the final remaining major Intel-only computer builder—a title which has ironically now been passed to Apple. For a very long time, sticking with Intel was a logical course for Dell. Although AMD processors have occasionally taken over the performance lead, the discounts Dell has been able to receive for sticking with Intel-only have apparently made up the difference.

Recently, however, Intel has been offering across-the-board price cuts to all PC manufacturers—an action which finally knocked Dell from the driver’s seat of the Intel bandwagon.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Since the unveiling of the low-cost, low-energy AMD Operton in 2003, Intel has been struggling in the server-grade processor insdustry. Now, IBM has announced their decision to use the AMD Operton processor in their new line of BladeCenter servers. System x3455, x3655 and x3755 rack-mount servers, two-way Bladecenter LS21, and four-way LS41 blade servers sporting the new AMD processors have already been announced. IBM will continue this transition over the next three months.

From the article:
“IBM’s choice is by all means an important victory over rival Intel, which is struggling to sell the remaining deposit of server processors before the general acceptance of Woodcrest X5100 chips. Unfortunately for Intel, at the end of the second quarter, Advanced Micro had 26 per cent of the market for servers built on personal computer chips, more than double its share a year earlier, according to Mercury Research.”

Could this be lights out for Intel?”

Straight from Ars Technica: “While Intel seems to be spending the entire summer rolling out new chips based on its Core architecture, AMD is still months away from any architecture transition of its own. In light of that, it’s fighting back as best it can, with massive price cuts across the board and the debut of a new Opteron CPU next month.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “But did you know that the entire deal still has several important milestones to reach before it’s put in the books? It will, and the fact of the matter is that neither AMD nor Intel used this past weekend to change corporate life as we know it. There’s going to be a lot of “analysis” out there over the next several days, but remember this key point: very few people actually know anything for certain. And when it comes to claims about motherboard licensing, ATI, NVIDIA, and chipsets, bear this one key point in mind: this is not a done deal.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “For years, the names Dell and Intel went together like chocolate and peanut butter. The former rose to the top of the PC heap exclusively selling chips from the latter, and despite the ground AMD made up on Intel when it came to CPU performance, the two companies hung together until earlier this summer. That’s when Dell was forced by market realities to begin offering servers powered by Opteron CPUs.Since then, interested observers have been waiting for the other shoe to drop: Dell desktops with AMD inside. Those should be coming soon. Dell CEO Kevin Rollins says that the newly formed relationship between the two companies will “expand.” He didn’t offer any additional details on products that might use AMD CPUs and when we might see them, but his comments corroborate what we have been hearing for some time from our sources inside Intel.

Make no mistake about it: the days of the cozy Dell-Intel partnership are gone forever. The Austin, TX-based company will still sell a large number of laptops, desktops, and servers with Intel CPUs, but expect to see AMD play a significantly larger role in Dell’s product lineup.”

Straight from Ars Technica: ” Now that the merger is official, AMD has a set of pages up with information on the combined company’s future plans. AMD execs also gave a conference call, in which they covered some of the reasons behind the merger. In short, the stated reasons for the merger were pretty much along the lines that we laid out in a recent article: “platformization” ala Intel, which would better enable the combined company to compete on the corporate desktop, and system-level CPU-GPU integration. The call also mentioned die-level CPU-GPU integration, a factor that we did not explore in the aforementioned article.”