The NY Times reported that Advanced Micro Devices plans to release processors with 12 cores, which changes its product road map and kills earlier plans to release 8-core chips. The 12-core processor, code-named Magny-Cours, will be targeted at servers and is due for release in the first half of 2010. The chip will include 12MB of L3 cache and support DDR3 RAM. AMD is jumping from a 6-core chip code-named Istanbul, due for release in the second half of 2009, straight to a 12-core chip the following year. Until last month, AMD officials repeated plans to ship the 8-core server chip, code-named Barcelona, in 2009.
AMD is also planning to release a 6-core chip code-named Sao Paulo in 2010. The chip will include 6MB of L3 cache and support for DDR3 RAM. Sao Paulo chips could meet the need of systems that don’t require 12 cores, Allen said. The new chips will be more power efficient as they will be manufactured using the 45-nanometer process, an upgrade from the 65-nm process currently used to manufacture Barcelona (architecture in the picture below).
Even with AMD’s altered road map, Intel will remain formidable. Intel shipped 78.5 percent of chips in the first quarter of 2008, while AMD held a 20.6 percent market share, a slight gain from the 18.7 percent market share it held in the first quarter of 2007.
I guess jumping the gun would pretty much term what AMD has done here as they talk about technology they will roll out in 2010 while we’re still in 2008. Seemingly befuddled by how they can’t seem to gain more solid share in the race against Intel, this seems like a marketing “ploy” by AMD to bring people into the hype of a very future-based 12-core technology. Currently, at the 4-socket, quad core level, which equates to a 16-core server today, companies (at least here in the Philippines) are just realizing the potential of the 16-core platform. Virtualization has really not taken off just yet, and it may be a year more before the market here matures to move into that realm. If we talk about worldwide though, a lot of corporations have already matured in this space, and that outlook for a 32-core system would be very significant. But again, that is technology 2 years down the line.
While AMD has just recently launched Barcelona, it seems to me that this is quite a distraction to that announcement. And in the end, I’m sure the guys at AMD realize that even with Barcelona, they are still not at par with Intel as their competitors had come out with their 4-core processors on Nehalem quite a bit before this recent AMD release. So the logic of exciting everyone with a potential 12-core processor down the line is understandable, but I’m pretty sure Intel also has this in the works and are not as excited to talk about it just yet as they do not need to.
If we take a look at how it has been in the past years, Intel will probably come out with theirs even earlier, and with a better architecture as they look to incorporate the main advantages AMD has over them currently. Nehalem for Intel has already been announced for the 4-core front quite a few long months before AMD’s current equivalent in Barcelona, and it is going to be 8-cores for a single processor die in 2009 for their second phase. Let’s see how all this goes as AMD tries to grab more share from Intel in the up and coming months.
