AMD Archive

After years breathing AMD's dust, Intel beat its rival to the punch by releasing its quad-core Xeon 5300 'Clovertown' processor for servers in November. But AMD's 'Barcelona' quad-core chip, due to arrive midway through 2007, will be a significant notch faster than the Clovertown chips expected to be on the market at that time, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products. "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent," Allen said.

"In a series of announcements and conference calls, culminating in a recentanalyst meeting, AMD has been slowly revealing pieces of the big pictureregarding where they plan to take their platforms in the coming years. I'vebeen following the coverage, and I've put togethera synthesis of it below."

"Last week, AMD showed off a working quad-core processor at an event in San Francisco. The company had promised a quad-core demo by the end of the year, and they did manage to deliver, even if all the audience saw was a Windows machine running task manager. Clearly, the silicon for their next-generation core microarchitecture, codenamed Barcelona (also popularly called 'K8L'), has a few kinks left to be worked out."

AMD has stopped its work on the Personal Internet Communicator project after nearly two years of planning and development. The PIC was announced in late 2004 as a USD 250 headless computer, sporting a Geode x86 processor, 128MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. PIC was designed for 'emerging markets' where the cost of computer hardware is seen as prohibitively high.

If there was any doubt that CPU maker AMD's principal reason for acquiring graphics chip powerhouse ATI was to build a mobile computing platform that would rival Intel's Centrino, it was erased this morning with AMD's announcement of a platform project it's currently calling 'Fusion'.

"AMD described its forthcoming quad-core processor, codenamed Barcelona, in a session at today's Microprocessor Forum. Details of the new microarchitecture on which the processor is based (codenamed K8L) have been known for some time now. Still, the event brought some new info, and here are some highlights that I've culled from some of the reporting on it."

AMD plans to announce its new 'Rev F' generation of Opteron server processors Tuesday, the next volley in a competition with Intel's newly competitive Xeon models. The Rev F Opterons, all dual-core models, add new virtualisation abilities and faster memory, run at the same 2.6GHz top speed as preceding mainstream models, and plug into AMD's new 'Socket F'. Although that new socket disrupts server designers' easy upgrade path from one Opteron to the next, it also lays the foundation for quad-core chips in 2007 and for server designs through the end of the decade.

AMD is strongly considering open-sourcing at least a functional subset of ATI’s graphics drivers. It’s time for X Window System, OpenGL, and client virtualization for which ATI binary drivers aren’t available to escape the ghetto of the 1980s-era framebuffer. And what a boon for PR. If AMD’s graphics cards were the only ones with open device drivers, it might affect a buying decision or two.

Following its recent partnership with AMD to put the latter's chip in its server product line, Dell Computer confirmed this week that it will launch AMD-based laptops as early as October. The move could deal another blow to rival Intel. Dell will release mobile computers running AMD's Sempron and Turion 64x2 processors in early October, representatives from both AMD and Dell, told CNET Taiwan. Initial plans will target consumer models equipped with 15.4-inch displays.

AMD said it increased its share of the x86 server processor market to 25.9 percent, a number confirmed by Mercury Research's Dean McCarron, who tracks market share figures. Intel now holds 72.9 percent of the overall market for x86 processors, while AMD has 21.6 percent.

As rumoured about for weeks now, with the strongest rumours appearing a few days ago, AMD has bought ATI. "AMD, the world's second-biggest semiconductor maker, agreed to buy ATI for USD 5.4 billion, adding computer-graphics chips to its product lineup. ATI shares surged. AMD Chief Executive Officer Hector Ruiz is making the biggest purchase in the company's history to help escalate his challenge to Intel, which dominates the market for semiconductors. "

AMD, the No. 2 supplier of computer processors, is close to a deal to buy graphics chip maker ATI for USD 5.5 billion, a source familiar with the situation said on Friday. Any such deal would shake up the processor industry, which is witnessing a battle over market share between AMD and rival Intel.

AMD executives said this week that they will promote its '4x4' enthusiast platform to counter the Core 2 Duo. AMD also plans to push a sort of 'performance number' into the market to redefine how consumers should think about power. The 4x4 platform will place two physical sockets on a motherboard, connected by AMD's Direct Connect architecture. Mounted on each socket will be an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor, for a total of 4 cores. An eight-core '8X8' program will roll out in 2007.

AMD announced its second-quarter revenue figures ahead of schedule on Thursday, and investors are not going to be pleasantly surprised. AMD's revenue for the second quarter is expected to be USD 1.21bn, a 52 percent increase compared with the same period last year. However, analysts had been expecting AMD to record USD 1.3bn in revenue, according to estimates polled by Thomson First Call.