AMD Demos Quad-Core Chips

By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 12/1/2006

Nipping at the heels of fellow MPU maker Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. this week demonstrated what it touts as the industry's first native quad-core x86 server processor, achieving four x86 processing cores on a single die of silicon. The processors are slated for a Q2 2007 debut.

But AMD has already been beaten to the quad-core punch. In November, Intel shipped its first quad-core processor families, the Quad-Core Xeon 5300 for business and Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core for gamers.  At that time, AMD brushed off the news of Intel's quad-core debut, pointing out that Intel's quad core consists of two dual core die stacked in a single package rather than a completely new quad-core approach.

"AMD discussed quad-core requirements with our customers and their end users, and determined that a stopgap, multi-chip module approach (such as Intel's) would fall short in several dimensions, most notably in performance scalability under real application loads, and power efficiency," Randy Allen, corporate VP of AMD's server and workstation business, said in a statement earlier this month.

At the annual AMD industry analyst forum this week, a server powered by four upcoming Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, manufactured on 65nm silicon-on-insulator process technology, was shown utilizing all 16 cores, AMD said. By delivering a consistent thermal envelope while adding two more processing cores, along with micro-architectural enhancements, AMD said it expects to significantly advance the performance-per-watt capabilities of its Opteron processors.

Upgradeability from dual-core to quad-core processors is expected to be as straightforward as it was from single-core to dual-core with AMD, with unchanged thermal and electrical envelopes, the company said. In this week's demonstration, the company said, the reference server platform was seamlessly upgraded to quad-core by replacing the server's existing DDR2-based AMD Opteron processors with the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and updating the BIOS.

The upcoming AMD Opteron processors are based on AMD's direct connect architecture, which the company claims reduces bottlenecks found in legacy front-side bus x86 architectures and includes AMD's integrated memory controller. According to the company, the processors are designed to enhance I/O throughput and CPU-to-CPU communication, and to deliver increased performance with low power consumption and low memory latency.