From Barcelona, AMD puts distance in name and size between past and present
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will today release its next generation Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Shanghai, ahead of scheduleas it moves to shift attention from the ill-fated Barcelona chip to this smaller and faster device.
The new 45nm Opteron chip's release is getting a quick endorsement from IBM, which said today that it was producing four servers with AMD's chip for use in high-performance applications, virtualization and collaboration environments, and big databases.
Barcelona, a 65nm chip, was announced in September 2007 at a corporate bash on a former military base, the Presidio, in San Francisco. Never mind that Intel had already released a quad-core, AMD was confident it had the better chip.
But a bug was discovered in the processor and Barcelona didn't ship in volume until April 2008. AMD had planned to release Shanghai early next year. But it's out early, and AMD says its delivers a 35% performance boost at 2.7 GHz versus Barcelona's 2.3 GHz top-end speed. The new chip has 6MB of L3 cache versus 2MB in the earlier quad core.
AMD in particular is emphasizing how its new server chip handles virtualization. For instance, it has reduced the amount of time it takes for the CPU to shift control from one virtual machine to another by 25 percent, "so the processor can spend more time processing the virtualized application than switching," said Brent Kerby, a senior product manager at AMD. The chip also improves its power management, and at idle uses about 35% less power than Barcelona, the company said.
AMD used a new manufacturing process in making Shanghai chip called immersion lithography. In this process, ultra purified water is injected between the lens and wafer, acting like a contact lens that improves the accuracy of the manufacturing. It's a process that will be especially needed for 32nm-size chips.
Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner, said Shanghai was a nice boost on the quad-core front that looks good against Intel's chips. But Reynolds didn't see the chip stealing the market. Its likely customers will be users shopping for a good ratio of price and performance in a chip.
Shanghai "keeps the light burning for the next round of product ???- it's more of a maintenance product then something to try to move ahead in the market," said Reynolds.
Next up for AMD will be its six-core chip, code named Istanbul, due out late next year. Since the splashy release of Barcelona, AMD regrouped and last month said it would split off manufacturing operations to create a separate fabrication plant, called the Foundry Company. The split, its officials argued, would improve its ability to focus on development of new products.
The new IBM servers are blades and rack mounted systems. While vendors often time server releases to the same day as new chips are introduced, AMD president and CEO Dirk Meyer told analysts last month that his company's relationship with IBM was special.
"IBM has publicly expressed their support behind the Foundry Company venture and the reason is clear. This brings technically and financially strong foundry to the IBM ecosystem. Clearly that is good for IBM. They see that and as a result of that I do expect the partnership between the two companies to get stronger overtime," said Meyer, according to a transcript of this call on the Seeking Alpha Web site .
