AMD out from Hibernation, but Intel never slept?

By this April AMD will roll out its long famed Barcelona Quad cores, onto the retail market. They were supposed to do this by the end of 2007 [read here], but unfortunately, some issues like Visualization problems and breakdown at high workloads kept them from going. But, now they have filled in new silica and are all set to challenge the blue chip maker.
Barcelona is the code name for the new quad series of Opterons, and is a continuation of AMDs quest for dominance in the multicore market. Though most feel that AMD is trailing by an year, they are confident and proud about their offering. AMD says this gives better performance and have a cleaner and compact instruction set, and even does not have extra heat dissipation compared to its earlier dual core variants. Already the Barcelona has been deployed in some high profile computer centers like Texas Advanced Computing Center. Now, AMD is looking at vendors like HP, IBM, Dell etc to sellout the new Opterons.
At the same time Intel has announced it would be ready with its new 6 core processor code named Dunnington (sure, even I feel the name is wierd), which is supposed to hit the markets later this year, also the 'Tukwila' (that's the wierdest) project which is a quad-core Itanium with 2 billion transistors, the already famed Nehalem.
Well most feel Intel is ahead now, at least for the next 12 months, but we cannot rule out the Green boy, he has done it before, he may repeat the "Hamilton act" (as we call in Formula1).

P.S. I am sorry for not posting for last four months, I had some personal debacles, but now it is going to be as frequent as ever.

codevalley

AMD trying to pull Transmeta out of woods?

A few months ago, I had written about the AMD- Raza deal,AMD selling off its Alchemy range to Raza and also stopping its Geode division, now it seems they did that to help Transmeta with their Crusoe and Efficeon family which where directly in contention with the formers' market. Now, they have gone a step further by granting a mammoth 7.5$ cash for preferred stock deal with Transmeta.

Transmeta was once one of the better processor manufacturers who were known for their low power processors, but lately are struggling int the market. Last year they posted a net loss of over 24$ million. They had to make amends by cutting over 39% of their employee strength and also concentrating more over lawsuits over intel on Intellectual property infringement. Maybe AMD felt they have to back Transmeta now, already AMD has lost a lot of money in 2007 Q1. As the saying goes, "Enemy's enemy becomes friend...".

Transmeta did not waste the oppurtunity to lavish praise on AMD, "AMD has long been a leader in the development and delivery of energy-efficient, high-performance computing technologies, standards and initiatives," stated Transmeta president and CEO Les Crudele. "Transmeta has been proud to endorse and contribute to those industry leading activities, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration with AMD on technology initiatives in the future."

In return AMD may hope to take advantage of energy-efficient Transmeta technology to their own advantage . AMD President and CEO Dirk Meyer claims, "Transmeta was a key ally in helping to bring our highly-successful AMD64 technology to market and has supported the widespread industry adoption of both AMD64 and AMD’s HyperTransport technology."
But I am not sure if there is going to be a repeat of the ATI merger, here.

Interesting note: Linus Trovalds was an employee of Transmeta once upon a time.

codevalley

AMD's new desktop PHENOMenon

AMD has said last month that Barcelona range of processors will get them their lost glory. Now, they have moved a step forward from dream to reality, as they announced that later this year they would be launching their new range of powerful desktop range of Quad Cores and Dual Cores named Phenom. Atleast the name looks appealing than the Core2 from Intel, for now. But we will have to wait and watch how they differ in performance. Later this year the quad core Phenom FX, Phenom X4 and the dual core Phenom X2 will be ready.

AMD has been pleading for long that the Intel quad cores, which are actually 2 dual cores fused are no match to their actual quad cores with 4 independent cores, better connectivity, independent processing backed up by the powerful and fast Hypertransport, [read Barcelona]. Intel who were arguing at first are now actually designing chips in the similar way with integrated Memory controllers and point to point links, this would be ready only by 2008. The product is called Nehelam.

The AMD quads are based on Barcelona architecture, and would be a big test for them. The enthusiasts are looking forward to this release as this is the superior to Intel's fused quads. This would also give AMD a chance to revive its multicore market which it lost to Intel last year.
AMD will also give 4x4 a boost, which was introduced in between a big hype but which eventually died down. They will also introduce a product called FASN8 which could hold to Phenom quads. That would be a nice fiesta for performance hungry users.
codevalley

Intel going for the kill??

Two weeks ago, at Bejing, Intel revealed its new plans, which revolved mostly around a new chip, codenamed Larabee. which is actually dubbed as a processor for consumer devices, which uses an array of cores running in parallel to give trillion floating point instructions per second. The processor is also x86 compatible and hence easier to program, according to Intel. The processor would go public by 2008, maybe after the Fusion release by AMD. The processor is aimed at high end scientific apps.
Another one in the making is Tolapai, which also combines x86 processor core with an encryption co-processor, which will also consume less power and space. It would go in air later this year. It is aimed at the security computing sector.
Though the Larabee chip was slated as a competitor to the Fusion processor, the real threat is actually Nehalem processor, which would have a GPU core at some point of time. The chip which would be out the late 2008 will have upto 8 cores. It is also dubbed as the "dynamically scalable procesor", meaning the intel designers would develop variants of the processor for each sector. It would also support mutithreading, and also take the most successful technologies that brought AMD to top, a faster memory controller bus and the point to point links connecting the cores. This processor would be fabricated in the 45 nm technology.
Already the Penryn processor, which is etched on 45nm cores, will provide 20% performance improvement over Core2Duo on general apps and 40% on games. This is more or a less a shrink of C2D architecture into 45nm.
Intel already is working hard with Beyond3d to get their GPU homeworks correct. So, tighten your seatbelts and watch the processor war.
codevalley

Intel and the benchmark scams?

We all believe that now, it is Intel's time to beat the hell out of AMD after the release of the Core Microarchitecture. But, for so long AMD had been shouting foulplay by Intel to mislead the analyst, Wall street and the consumers to make them believe this. Until recently, I never gave my ear to it, despite being an AMD fanboy. But, now analysis and post mortem of the presentation meet by, Intel Server Platforms Group general manager Kirk Skaugen on February 21st, and later on 28th is shocking to say the least.

The way Intel has presented the presentation has been very unprofessional and unethical. They have tried to impose and highlight their supremacy over AMD in a very cheap manner. These are the few of those.

• Intel has compared their latest Xeon processors with pretty much old Opterons to declare themselves the leader. To make it worse, they even have a unnamed processor compared with the Xeon. Some of the benchmarks are with dual cores, some with single cores, and one nameless processor. All the while the Intel counterpart remains the same.
• Lot of footnotes and disclaimers on each of the slide, which are hardly legible and the scores have been twisted, the slide title showing two high end Intel and AMD processors while tests being done between, the best Intel and a weaker AMD.
• In the 1st presentation (on 21st), a footnote says " the latest opteron XXX has not been used because the benchmarks are not available, and hence we are comparing against an older version". Next presentation(on 28th) , the footnote is missing, so we naturally assume that it uses the latest Opteron, but on close examination, it is still the older one.
• A slide show titled comparison of Xeon 5xxx with Opteron 2xxx, and not a single comparison is with 2xxx and this fact is safely buried in the cryptic footnotes.
• They were using a six year old SPEC benchmark to prove that they were leaders and the wide gap in the benchmarks, while no one is using those benchmarks and the new ones are pretty common.

These medley of errors, or delibarate makeovers flooded the whole presentation. I wonder how could a high profile company even dare to do this? Obviously, every single analyst would have figured out these. This has simply been shameful, to say the least.
Adopted from: blogs.ZDnet.com

myLot User Profile

download the Intel presentation and check for yourself.
Read the original article.
Post-mortem report (must see).

codevalley

technorati tags:intel, amd, scam, benchmark, presentation, opteron, xeon, core, dualcore, singlecore, SPEC

Fusion, the AMD way...

The ATI merger by AMD in the second half of 2006 was seen as a very strategic move by AMD. And the analysts got it right when AMD did not take much time and in late 2006 revealed its plan for the unique processor codenamed Fusion. Intel got back their prime spot with the release of Core series of processors, while AMD was caught napping over the 64-bit success. So, maybe this is the act of AMD to get closer to Intel once again.

What is Fusion?
The innovative plan of AMD is to integrate the GPU and CPU into a single die as two heterogeneous cores and hence improve the performance-per-watt-per dollar, a new yardstick posed by AMD. AMD already has the Hypertransport advantage. Now, in Fusion you have two cores, one for processor with its own cache, and another, GPU with its own buffers. Both of these are joined by the crossbar and integrated memory controller. Obviously everything is connected through the high speed hypertransport technology. But, it is not too clear whether the GPU will have a frame buffer for itself.

Is it good for me?
It is a hard question to answer, though AMD claims this compound processor will provide a reasonable graphics performance, it is not quite clear what do they mean by reasonable here. Anyway this is not for those hardcore gamers and AMD will continue to churn out graphics card under the ATI brand, as they agree graphics cards are necessary for high end users and physics processing. This fusion might be best suited for Laptops and notebooks.

When would the egg hatch?
Anywhere around 2008 Q4 or 2009 Q1 if everything goes well. But I still believe that is a far fetched call. They should get it by at least Q1 2008 if they need to pose any competition to Intel. As Intel is already getting ready for 45nm fabrication and even 30nm chips.

Anyway I feel this might well turn out to be a trump card for AMD to once again do the impossible, beat Intel. They have done it once, with 64-bit processors. But can they repeat itself and prove to the critics that it was not a fluke? Only time can tell.

codevalley

Intel, AMD leave the mobile phone processor market

In early june this year AMD divested the whole non x86 processor line, Alchemy line of processors selling it to Raza microelectronics Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Though this does not mean complete sell off of its mobile processor sector, their presence is now restricted to support the RMI.
As if following the "green company", Intel later in the month announced that they will sell off the XScale PXAxxx applications and 3G baseband based processors for a speculated sum of $600 Million along existing liabilities, to a company called Marvell. This is seen as a strategic move by the Chip major. It was quoted Intel saying that it was to focus on its core x86 and wireless LAN chipset businesses.
This makes Marvell the single largest supplier of 3G and smartphone processors. However, Intel has reserved some fuel for the mobile, as they still hold the 4G range of processor technology with them.
codevalley

AMD Intel Duel heating up!

July 2006 marked the revival of lost glory for the inventors of the microprocessors, Intel, with release of the Intel Core Series of processors and first market success in the last three years since the market invasion by Athlon and 64bit processors by AMD.
This was followed by the huge price slash by the Green company, up to 60% and acquisition of ATI, the graphics vendor giant. Now they have gone further and have announced their new offing, Fusion, a processor that will incorporate a GPU onto it. How far this is going to succeed is for time to tell. But AMD fanboys atleast have something to cheer, with the tentative date of Fusion release set to 2008 Q2. Also the 4x4 and Intel's Kentsfield will be locking horns soon with 4x4 schedule revised to 2007 Q2.
Analysts think that 4x4 is better than Intel's Quadro as it has the real quadcore architecture as compared to the pseudo quadcore architecture of Quadro.
codevalley