<span class="content"><font size="2">Today, AMD releases their new 45nm Opterons, codenamed <em>Shanghai.</em> It's been a very quiet year for AMD on the server front, after a fairly rough launch of <em>Barcelona</em>, but AMD hopes to regain consumer confidence and earn back some market share from Intel.</font> <p><strong><font size="2">A little history</font></strong></p> <p><font size="2"><em>Barcelona</em> was AMD's first product based on their monolithic quad-core design, which was a very different path from what Intel decided to take. Intel decided effectively to join two dual-core CPUs at the hip to make their quad-core product. <em>Barcelona</em> was not a smooth launch. Hindered by CPU design issues and supply problems, it was one of the worst launches we've seen from AMD. However, today is a new day, a new part, and hopefully new customers.</font></p> <p><font size="2"><em>Shanghai</em> is an update to the <em>Barcelona</em> architecture, which means it is socket compatible and should be a drop-in replacement in servers that have a BIOS update that supports <em>Shanghai.</em> Something that some people might not realize is that AMD uses the same core product in their 2P, 4P, and 8P product lines. This may not matter to everyone, but it makes the life of OEMs a little easier. Besides the various tweaks to the <em>Barcelona</em> architecture, <em>Shanghai</em> is also a die shrink to 45nm. As AMD has already revealed in their 2009/2010 roadmap, <em>Shanghai</em> will be with us until the end of 2009 as a quad-core chip, followed by a six-core product when AMD releases <em>Istanbul.</em><br /> <br /> All of the <em>Shanghai</em> parts that release this year will be 75W versions, ranging from 2.3 to 2.7GHz. In Q1 of 2009, AMD expects to release HE (55W) models as well as SE (105W) models. Another change that's coming next year is the move to HyperTransport 3.0, which will increase bandwidth by up to 17.6GB/s. We found it a bit odd that there will be effectively an update to the architecture to support this move, and that this feature didn't make this initial product release.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3456">Read more...</a><br /> <br /> </font></p> <p><!-- google_ad_section_end --><font size="2"></font></p> </span>

<p><font size="2">It started with Intel quietly (but not <em>too</em> quietly) informing many in the industry of its plans to enter the graphics market with something called Larrabee. </font></p> <p><font size="2">NVIDIA responded by quietly (but not <em>too</em> quietly) criticizing the nonexistant Larrabee.<br /> <br /> What we've seen for the past several months has been little more than jabs thrown back and forth, admittedly with NVIDIA being a little more public with its swings. Today is a big day, without discussing competing architectures, Intel is publicly unveiling, for the first time, the basis of its Larrabee GPU architecture.<br /> <br /> Well, it is important to keep in mind that this is first and foremost NOT a GPU. It's a CPU. A many-core CPU that is optimized for data-parallel processing. What's the difference? Well, there is very little fixed function hardware, and the hardware is targeted to run general purpose code as easily as possible. The bottom lines is that Intel can make this very wide many-core CPU look like a GPU by implementing software libraries to handle DirectX and OpenGL.</font></p> <p><font size="2">It's not quite emulating a GPU as it is directly implementing functionality on a data-parallel CPU that would normally be done on dedicated hardware. And developers will not be limited to just DirectX and OpenGL: this hardware can take pure software renderers and run them as if the hardware was designed specifically for that code.</font></p> <p><font size="2">There is quite a bit here, so let's just jump right in.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3367">Read more...</a></font></p> <p><font size="2"><!-- google_ad_section_end --></font></p>

<div id="intelliTxt"><span class="content"> <p><font size="2">Today is an important day, it's the release of the long awaited Centrino 2 mobile platform (codenamed Montevina) from Intel. Unfortunately, product won't be shipping until August and review samples aren't exactly available so what follows can barely be called a preview. We'll take you through the components that make up Centrino 2 and give some guidance as to how it should perform, but we can hardly provide much in the way of test data.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3356">Read more...</a></font></p> </span></div>

As much as AMD has been ridiculed for its expensive purchase of ATI, the only part of the combined company that’s actually producing exciting product these days is the graphics division. Hot on the heels of the release of the Radeon HD 4800 series AMD has three new Phenom processors...unfortunately this isn’t an architectural change, and what we have today are two lower clocked and one higher clocked model.

The first processor is the Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition. Clocked at 2.6GHz, the Black Edition moniker indicates that it ships completely unlocked. Unfortunately the unlocked nature doesn’t really help you too much as the 65nm Phenoms aren’t really able to scale much beyond 2.7GHz consistently, so it’s mostly a marketing feature.

The next two are potentially more interesting, AMD is introducing the Phenom X4 9350e and 9150e. The little-e indicates that these are energy efficient processors, in fact they are AMD’s first quad-core Phenoms to carry a 65W TDP (the rest of the lineup is 95W, 125W or 140W).

Unfortunately AMD doesn’t achieve these low TDPs by simply power binning its Phenom processors, instead what we’ve got here are two very low-clocked Phenom CPUs: 2.0GHz and 1.8GHz, respectively. By reducing clock speed and lowering the core voltage, AMD was able to hit a 65W TDP (something we’ll prove a little later). The 9150e also uses a lower North Bridge clock of 1.6GHz instead of 1.8GHz for the majority of the Phenom line.

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<font size="2"><span class="content"> <p>Accounting for up to 56% of market share in the US and 40% worldwide, <strong>the quad-socket market is the last stronghold of AMD.</strong> It is a small stronghold, as for every 4S server, there about 17 dual-socket and four single-socket servers sold. However, since each 4S server contains four CPUs, the 4S server market accounts for about 10% of the server CPUs sold. More importantly, the margins are quite a bit higher than in the popular 2S market, and as a result those 10% of server CPU shipments are good for 20% of the revenue, and it gets even better.</p> <p>IDC expects that in 2008 the 4S market will grow up to 14%, more than twice the growth of the dual-socket server market^[1]. GCC reports that about 57% of 297 enterprises reported that they are going to buy quad-socket servers, and no less than 31% indicated that they were going to buy more quad-socket systems than in the past. Only 15.5% said they would buy less of these systems^[2]. This trend is relatively easy to explain: IDC studies indicate that the number of x86 servers bought for the purpose of virtualization will show a Compound Annual Growing Rate of 40-45% until 2010^[3]. Although IDC's studies have been overoptimistic before, we think it's safe to conclude that the 4S x86 market has a bright future ahead.</p> <p>It is no surprise that AMD and Intel have started a bitter fight for this profitable market. The hostilities started to heat up in early Q3 of 2007. AMD introduced <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3057" target="_blank">a 3GHz (95W) Opteron 8222 and 3.2GHz (120W) Opteron 8224</a> that outpaced Intel's Xeon MP &quot;Tulsa&quot; by a wide margin. Just a few weeks later, the most impressive Xeon MP launch we have seen in years became a reality: the Caneland platform with the Intel Xeon &quot;Tigerton MP&quot; was born. The new Intel 7300 chipset offered no less than four independent FSB, twice as many as <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2872&amp;p=2" target="_blank">the previous quad-socket platform</a>, but the most important improvement was the CPU: the old Xeon 71xx CPU had two NetBurst based cores; the new Xeon 73xx was a quad-core CPU, based on Intel's 65nm Core architecture.</p> <p>At <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2897&amp;p=11" target="_blank">the end of our review of the quad-core Xeon DP &quot;Clovertown</a>&quot;, we called attention to an Intel CPU labeled as &quot;Clovertown MP&quot;. That is exactly what the current quad-core Intel is, a Xeon MP version of the Xeon &quot;Clovertown&quot; 53xx DP. Originally, the &quot;Clovertown MP&quot; was probably a backup plan of Intel's Whitefield processor, a quad-core CPU with a massive shared L2 cache. As Whitefield failed to materialize, plan B went into action. The Clovertown MP was renamed to &quot;Tigerton&quot;, or a 65nm quad-core Xeon MP that is based on two dual-core &quot;Core&quot; chips.</p> <p>Intel conquered the dual and single socket server markets as you can see in the graphic below. Its &quot;Core&quot; based Xeons have been gaining ground quickly for almost two years now. The sharp increase in market share since the introduction of the dual-core &quot;Core&quot; architecture (&quot;Woodcrest&quot; May 2006) and quad-core (November 2006) is remarkable. A more recent report of mercury research claims that <a href="http://www.edn.com/article/CA6553931.html" target="_blank">Intel Server CPU unit share is still about 87</a>% which is a crushing superiority in market share.</p> </span><span class="content"> <p>The introduction of quad-core Xeon MP should not have been a big problem for AMD, as it launched <a href="http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3091" target="_blank">the &quot;native&quot; quad-core Opteron</a> 83xx series a few weeks after the appearance of the Intel's Xeon MP. Unfortunately for AMD, <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3260&amp;p=2" target="_blank">the TLB bug</a> threw a fly into the soup. While this bug is irrelevant for the desktop market, erratum 298 is not acceptable in the quad-socket market. On a virtualized server there is a small chance - compared to the infinitesimal small chance in desktop use - that the bug could rear its ugly head.</p> <p>That allowed Intel's Tigerton to besiege the last AMD stronghold for more than 7 months. The only thing AMD could do is lower the prices of their server CPUs. AMD managed to keep the market share loss to a minimum but the average selling price of an AMD server chip fell from a little less than $400 (Q2 2007) to less than $300 at the end of 2007. Something had to be done, or the Intel engineers would get bored without a decent challenge&hellip;.<br /> </p> <p><a href="http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3335">Read more...</a><br /> </p> </span></font><span class="content"> <p> </p> <p><br /> </p> </span>