AMD Hopes Quad-Core Server Chip Is Answer to Woes

[Capper]

Struggling to rebound from a $574 million loss in fourth-quarter earnings that it reported earlier this week, Advanced Micro Devices is pinning its hopes for recovery in 2007 to its planned "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip.
Since it launched in November, Intel's competing "Clovertown" quad-core Xeon chip has been adopted mainly for high-end research server platforms; Clovertown has been hobbled in part by a lack of multithreaded software capable of taking full advantage of the new chip technology. But AMD hopes to sell its Barcelona chip to users ranging from managers of high-performance computing centers to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs).
Revenue Increase Hopes

AMD expects a bounce in revenue when Barcelona launches the processor by the middle of 2007, since many customers have delayed buying new systems until the chip comes out. The company hopes that Barcelona will, at long last, enable AMD to break into the low-end server segment, which includes one-chip and two-chip computers and tower PCs, and rack-mounted servers.
"We're not yet in the SMB segment; it represents for us a great volume opportunity since we have so little market share now," said Kevin Knox, vice president of AMD's commercial business, on Wednesday.
AMD's share of the market for servers, blades, and workstations has grown from just 2.8 percent in 2003--the year it launched the Opteron chip--to 6 percent in 2004, 12.2 percent in 2005, and 27 percent in 2006, the company claims. The only problem with that growth is that AMD has so few customers in the single-processor server segment. Its only products in that market are IBM's System x3105 and Sun Microsystems' Sun Fire X2100.
AMD will also try to gain extra profits by marketing denser chips as it switches its chip design from 90-nanometer to 65nm, and by developing more-efficient manufacturing methods as it changes from 200-millimeter to 300mm silicon wafers. In the long term, the company expects a return on its investment in making chips with even smaller (45nm) features, and on capitalizing on its 2006 acquisition of ATI to release a combined CPU and graphics processor called "Fusion" by 2009.
Barcelona will be AMD's first quad-core product and its first made with a 65nm manufacturing process. Its greatest advantages will come from improvements to the chip's processor core architecture that vastly enhance its virtualization abilities and from an increase from 64-bit to 128-bit computing, all without growing above the current Opteron's 68-watt and 95-watt thermal envelopes.

PC World - AMD Hopes Quad-Core Server Chip Is Answer to Woes

[JazzyJake]

i dont wanna see AMD go down, not after my most recent experience...(see sig)

[Jokerswild]

AMD has always had a uphill struggle against Intel.

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Jokerswild

AMD has always had a uphill struggle against Intel.

Exactly. Being down is nothing new for AMD. Spending all their piggy bang money on ATI might have set them back a little, but they're not going anywhere. AMD has spent most of it's life struggling to keep their head above water and this is nothing new. Yeah I'd like to see AMD with 50% of the market, but that's just not gonna happen anytime soon.

[Captain Crunch]

We need the healthy competition between these two.
I don't think AMD is going anywhere and hope one of there engineers pulls something out of there butts.
I like the underdog anyway!!

[fps justin]

If AMD is gone, i can only imagine what INTEL would do.

[Capper]

Originally Posted by Captain Crunch

We need the healthy competition between these two.
I don't think AMD is going anywhere and hope one of there engineers pulls something out of there butts.
I like the underdog anyway!!

Jeff's exactly correct....whether you use AMD or not isn't really the issue.....Healthy competition benefits the customer in better prices, as well as better products brought to market. I personally don't value any one company over another, I look for the best performance at the lowest cost.

[Captain Crunch]

I look for the best performance at the lowest cost.

Now that is what HL is all about............Myself I'm all bang for buck baby ............screw the $1000 CPU give me the $150 job do a decent overclock.
Bada bing bada boom now you have over 800 dollars for a new video card fool!!!!!!!!!

[Quakindude]

I whole-heartedly agree with having competition in the market place. I have used AMD CPU's for years and I love the underdog. Like Rich said though, I'm all about the bang for the buck category.

I wonder what makes AMD think they'll break through into the server market now after all these years? Intel's microarchitecture is superior to AMD's ATM.

I bet some one at Dell lost their ass over the whole AMD issue. With Intel coming out with the C2D's right after Dell bought up a ton of AMD CPU's, I bet somebody had to pay with their job for the losses Dell has taken with the AMD CPU's.

Or maybe there's still a lot of folks out there buying up AMD based systems, ignorantly blissful of Intel's new C2D's performance advantage, to have what it took AMD three years of marketing and promoting, residing in their system.

Just my random thoughts.

[polobunny]

There is a lot of folks still buying A64's. What is old for you can be new for the common. ;)
Besides, the Opty's were and are great. AMD will catch up, like they always did, and hopefully for them it's going to be like another A64 vs Pentium D fight.