AMD veep remains optimistic

8 Apr 2008 | 07:40 BST

By Sylvie Barak

YOU MIGHT THINK THAT Randy Allen, AMD server and workstation vice president, would not have much to smile about after his company was forced to delay its official launch of quad-core server chips back in 2007, but you’d be wrong. In an interview with ITWeek, Allen spoke in depth about the reasons for the delay, AMD’s plans for imminent re-launch, and his optimism for staying ahead of Intel’s game.

Allen told ITWeek that AMD was just preparing to ship out its first quad-core Opteron parts, codenamed Barcelona, whose launch had been frozen in September 2007 due to problems with their translation look aside buffers (TLB) in the L3 cache shared between all the cores on the chip. This could have potentially led to systems crashes, which made AMD feel it would be better advised “to delay a quarter, which is what happens if you have to make a change in the silicon,” said Allen.

Perhaps slightly surprising and not particularly credibly in light of the facts (AMD yesterday confirmed that they were to cull a whopping ten per cent of its workforce and that numbers were 15 per cent down this quarter from Q4 2007) Allen reckons that the company didn’t endure too serious a loss from the delay, claiming that market share had been retained, but that the incident had bruised their ego a bit.

Allen points to AMD’s “rock solid” lead in the four-socket server space, and the company’s growth in the single-socket business throughout 2007. In fact, the only decline, according to Allen, was in the two-socket space, which he blamed on Intel’s new quad-core chips, unveiled in the last quarter of 2007.

Explaining why he felt AMD still had the edge over their main competition, Allen pointed to AMD’s focus on ensuring that customers got more performance per Watt on products, that their platform was inherently stable and that they were still miles ahead in the field of virtualisation. Indeed, Barcelona allows customers to upgrade their existing servers for higher performance ones, without having to provide more power or more cooling.

Rivalry with Intel remains bitter though. Chipzilla unleashed its quad-core Xeons for multi-processor systems to coincide with AMD’s Barcelona launch in 2007. The company has also since unveiled their new 45nm quad-core chips and have announced an upcoming six-core Xeon. To make matters worse, Intel has said it will introduce its first chips based on the Nehalem multi-core architecture, the biggest competition to AMD’s chips, by the end of this year.

However, despite the fact that Nehalem seems to be similar to AMD’s Opteron in terms of each chip getting its own source of directly connected memory, the Barcelona design does have advantages in that each of its processor cores can be clocked down independently of the others. It also has something called Rapid Virtualisation Indexing which provides hardware support for mapping virtual machine memory to physical memory, boosting virtual workload performance.

Also, better late than never, AMD plans to level the playing field with its rival Intel again in the second half of 2008, when it launches its first processors manufactured using a 45nm process, followed by eight-core chips sometime in 2009.

Apparently the company’s first 45nm chip, dubbed Shanghai, will include a 6MB L3 cache, a significant upgrade from the 2MB of Barcelona, and will also give more instructions per clock cycle.

Allen said that in the future, AMD’s structure would expand to make way for eight and more core chips to be used in data centres. But currently, Allen’s main focus is shipping the new quad-core chips, which the company hopes can put them back in the race again. µ

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