From Barcelona, AMD puts distance in name and size between past and present
(Computerworld) Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will today release its next-generation Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Shanghai, ahead of schedule as it moves to shift attention from its ill-fated Barcelona chip to this smaller and faster device.
The new 45nm Opteron chip's release is getting a quick endorsement from IBM, which said today that it is producing four servers with AMD's chip for use in high-performance applications, virtualization and collaboration environments, and big databases.
Barcelona, a 65nm chip, was announced in September 2007 at a corporate bash on a former military base, the Presidio, in San Francisco. Never mind that Intel had already released a quad-core -- AMD was confident it had the better chip.
But a bug was discovered in the processor, and Barcelona didn't ship in volume until April 2008. AMD had planned to release Shanghai at the beginning of next year. But it's out early, and AMD said it delivers a 35% performance boost at 2.7 GHz vs. Barcelona's 2.3-GHz top-end speed. The new chip has 6MB of Level 3 cache vs. 2MB in the earlier quad-core.
AMD is emphasizing in particular how its new server chip handles virtualization. For instance, it has reduced the amount of time it takes for the CPU to shift control from one virtual machine to another by 25%, "so the processor can spend more time processing the virtualized application than switching," said Brent Kerby, a senior product manager at AMD. The chip also has improved power management; at idle, it uses about 35% less power than Barcelona, the company said.
More: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9120078&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1
(Computerworld) Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will today release its next-generation Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Shanghai, ahead of schedule as it moves to shift attention from its ill-fated Barcelona chip to this smaller and faster device.
The new 45nm Opteron chip's release is getting a quick endorsement from IBM, which said today that it is producing four servers with AMD's chip for use in high-performance applications, virtualization and collaboration environments, and big databases.
Barcelona, a 65nm chip, was announced in September 2007 at a corporate bash on a former military base, the Presidio, in San Francisco. Never mind that Intel had already released a quad-core -- AMD was confident it had the better chip.
But a bug was discovered in the processor, and Barcelona didn't ship in volume until April 2008. AMD had planned to release Shanghai at the beginning of next year. But it's out early, and AMD said it delivers a 35% performance boost at 2.7 GHz vs. Barcelona's 2.3-GHz top-end speed. The new chip has 6MB of Level 3 cache vs. 2MB in the earlier quad-core.
AMD is emphasizing in particular how its new server chip handles virtualization. For instance, it has reduced the amount of time it takes for the CPU to shift control from one virtual machine to another by 25%, "so the processor can spend more time processing the virtualized application than switching," said Brent Kerby, a senior product manager at AMD. The chip also has improved power management; at idle, it uses about 35% less power than Barcelona, the company said.
More: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9120078&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1
