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'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