AMD has high hopes for its upcoming native quad-core design
When it comes to quad-core processors for the desktop and
server arenas, Intel has pretty much had the market to itself since November
2006 (if you don't count AMD's
Quad FX platform). Intel's quad-core processors were officially announced on
November 14 in the form of the desktop-oriented Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and
the server-oriented Clovertown Xeon
5300 series.
Intel has been using its quad-core Clovertown processors to grab marketshare back from AMD in the
server markets and has
been putting significant pricing pressure on AMD. "Early indications
are that Clovertown is contributing a
meaningful amount of business to Intel in a surprisingly short period of time.
It's not marketing fluff," said Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron.
Technology Business Research's John Spooner added that Clovertown "has allowed Intel to
put some pricing pressure on AMD. Intel can tout a lower price per core, given
that it's pricing much of the quad-core Xeon 5300 line the same as its
dual-core Xeon 5100 chips."
AMD isn't taking this news lightly and is prepared
to fight back with its native quad-core Barcelona
processors in mid 2007. Intel's quad-core chips put two dual-core chips
onto a single package while AMD's approach has one quad-core chip on a single
package.
"We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40
percent," said AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation
products, Randy Allen.
AMD's Barcelona quad-core processors will be built on a 65nm
manufacturing process and the company also claims that they will have the same
thermal and electrical envelope as existing dual-core Opterons. The processors
will also feature 2MB
of shared L3 cache as well as AMD
Virtualization (AMD-V) technology for x86 virtualization.
Barcelona processors will also fit nicely into existing
Socket F systems and will
only require a BIOS update for system compatibility.
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