AMD Demos Quad-Core Opteron

A few weeks ago, Intel wrested bragging rights for performance from AMD by shipping the first x86 quad-core processor, the Xeon
5300.

AMD won’t have a competitive offering until
mid-2007, but the company showed it’s on track at an analyst event today in
Berkeley, Calif.

The quad-core AMD Opteron, code-named Barcelona, was shown running a
prototype multiprocessor (MP) server that featured four of the new chips for
a total of 16 computing cores. Barcelona maintains AMD’s push toward energy
efficient design as it runs in the same thermal envelope as the current
dual-core Opteron.

AMD executive Henri Richard shows AMD’s “native” quad-core chip next to Intel’s quad-core design which packages two dual-core processors. Source: AMD

When it launches, AMD expects to offer 2, 4 and 8
quad-core processor designs for servers and workstations.

Intel has a decided edge with numerous server
and workstation companies already shipping Xeon 5300-based systems. Kirk
Skaugen, general manager of Intel’s server platform group, boasted that
Intel will ship a million quad-core chips before AMD ships one.

But AMD said it’s happy with its decision to be late to the quad-core
party because it has a “truer” quad-core design. The Xeon 5300 packages two
of Intel’s early “Woodcrest” 5100 dual-core chips to get to quad-core.

“Our architecture is better tuned to multi-core,” Kishna Weaver, an Opteron
product manager, told internetnews.com. “Our competitor patched two
Woodcrests together, that’s one approach. Ours is native to one piece of
silicon and we’ve made micro-architectural enhancements to each of the cores
so you’ll see a lot of performance improvements.”

But at this point, AMD isn’t releasing much in the way of performance
specs. Weaver said early tests indicate database applications will see as
much as a 70 percent performance improvement over the current Opteron and
forty percent better floating point.

Transactional and other multithreaded
applications benefit most from multicore systems. AMD has a
Web site where company officials discuss and demo its quad-core efforts.

Analyst Rob Enderle with the Enderle Group said Intel will probably
maintain the highest performance crown for quad-core systems even after AMD
ships, but there will be many levels of customer interest.

“We’ll have to
wait and see what systems are priced at, but I expect AMD to be competitive
and priced aggressively at a high performance level.”