When it comes to quad-core chips, good things come to those who wait, AMD believes.
After years of being outplayed by AMD, 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. The quad-core chip will also outperform AMD's current dual-core Opterons on "floating point" mathematical calculations by a factor of 3.6 at the same clock rate, he said.
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FAQ: Quad-core processing
The quad-core processor era was ushered in with the release of quad-core processors for enthusiasts and for servers and workstations in November 2006
Trumpeting the performance of unreleased products is not a strategy unique to AMD. When launching the Xeon 5100 "Woodcrest" chip, Intel said its chips would beat AMD's by at least 40 percent.
Having a quad-core product has helped restore Intel's fortunes, and not just by buffing the chipmaker's image, Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron said. "Early indications are that Clovertown is contributing a meaningful amount of business to Intel in a surprisingly short period of time," McCarron said. "It's not marketing fluff."
For its part, Intel points to Sun's announcement on Monday that it would sell Intel-based servers, ending its reliance on AMD as its exclusive x86 server chip supplier. "We'll let our competitors talk the talk while we walk the walk," spokesman Bill Kircos said, adding that Intel will improve performance and energy efficiency compared to today's products.
In the third quarter of 2006, Intel's restored competitiveness helped Intel reclaim server processor market share lost to AMD. Mercury Research figures for the fourth quarter aren't yet available, but AMD warned earlier this month that its chip-selling prices were "significantly lower".
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," said Technology Business Research analyst, John Spooner.
"AMD has to respond to that by offering lower Opteron prices to satisfy those customers who might look at switching between now and when Barcelona comes out," Spooner said. "Discussing Barcelona performance is another way to help stave off Intel for the time being."
AMD stands by its Barcelona engineering decisions, though, including its choice to build a single chip with four cores rather than using Intel's dual-core, dual-chip package approach. AMD calls its approach "monolithic" or "native" quad core.
Customers don't care whether chips are monolithic or combine separate processors, Allen said, but they do care about performance. "We came to the conclusion that, given the capabilities and performance with the monolithic design, it was clearly the right answer," Allen said.
Barcelona uses several features...
