AMD will unveil a new chip design in 2009 for the server market and faster versions of its Barcelona quad-core chip later this year, company executives said on Thursday.
AMD's short-term goal is to get its Barcelona quad-core chip out into the market. The company has already said it plans to launch Barcelona chips at 2GHz later this quarter, but it also plans to ship faster versions of those chips in the fourth quarter, according to Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server products division.
The 2GHz launch speed had underwhelmed analysts who were expecting a faster debut from Barcelona, a quad-core server chip that AMD desperately needs to improve the average selling prices of its server chips.
Intel has been cutting into AMD's margins with its own quad-core chips, launched late last year as a package of two dual-core chips.
Barcelona will come in three varieties, Allen said. The mainstream version will account for 77 percent of AMD's quad-core shipments and it will debut at 2GHz.
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A more power-efficient version will debut at 1.9GHz, with faster speeds available later in the year, and a high-performance version will arrive in the fourth quarter at 2.3GHz or faster, he said.
AMD needs to show customers that it has a solid road map and, as a result, the company is trickling out details on its future chips.
"Shanghai" will come next year as a shrunken version of Barcelona, built on AMD's 45nm manufacturing technology. Both Shanghai and Barcelona will fit into chipsets that are currently available for AMD's dual-core chips.
In 2009 AMD will produce a new core design code-named "Sandtiger" and a new underlying platform timed to the uptake of DDR3 memory, Allen said.
Sandtiger will be an eight-core processor built on the 45nm manufacturing technology. Like Barcelona, it will also be a monolithic design with eight cores all integrated onto a single chip. Sandtiger will use a new design that Allen referred to as "Direct Connect 2". This will involve four hypertransport links on each chip, up from the current three, and it will come with an AMD-designed server chipset.
