Firing the latest salvo in its ongoing processor war with rival Intel, AMD today released its long-awaited Barcelona processor. The quad-core Opteron processor will be AMD’s new high performance processor offering, and the vendor is promising easy upgradeability and impressive new features and performance for channel partners and users.
The Barcelona launch comes less than a week after Intel launched Tigetron, its own quad-core Xeon processor designed for the high-end performance space, setting the stage for a quad-core battle between the two chip giants.
The company plans to launch a 1.9GHz, 68-watt Barcelona chip that focuses on power efficiency, and a 2.0GHz, 95-watt version that focuses on price/performance. In the fourth quarter, the company will follow that with a 2.3 GHz, 120-watt version for high-performance applications, and higher clock speeds for the first two chips.
Steve Demski, product manager for AMD Opteron, said there is much more to the Opteron launch than going from dual-core to quad-core.
“This is not just a doubling of our dual core by any means,” said Demski. “The reason why we’ve been taking our time getting this to market is because there’s so much more in it.”
A key facet of the new processor, said Demski, is its impressive performance per watt, delivering increased performance capabilities without a corresponding increase in power consumption. Indeed, by staying within the same thermal envelope as AMD’s dual-core product, Demski said partners can add quad-core systems into existing infrastructures within the same power levels.
“If you’re a channel partner and you designed a system around our previous dual core product, you can take that same system, flash the BIOS, drop in quad-core and have no further work to do,” he said. “It’s going to be very easy for the channel to adopt this into their existing product lines.”
Staying within that same power envelope plays into AMD’s desire for easy upgradeability with the new offering, which also includes socket compatibility with the previous generation for greater investment protection.
Also on the power front, Demski said AMD heard from users and the channel that they needed another way to account for anticipated power usage than the Thermal Design Power (TDP) standard. TDP informs the highest possible peak power usage, a level Demski said could only every reach by writing a virus to intentionally spike CPU usage.
Planning data centre power usage based on TDP caused businesses to overbuy on power and not use space efficently, he said. AMD’s answer is a new measurement called Average CPU Power (ACP), to provide a more realistic figure of likely power consumption, although TDP will also still be used.
“It makes it easier to understand what your real budget is going to be,” said Demski. “The previously way we were doing it forced people to overestimate their power needs, so this allows you to have better server power usage planning.”
Demski added by offering native quad-core processing Barcelona will also enable more efficient virtualization.
“Virtualization is the other key advancement with our quad core. Because it’s native it allows for the cores to communicate more efficiently,” he said. “With the competitive (quad core) there’s going to be some bottlenecking going on there.”
Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata, said he’ll have to wait to get all the performance numbers from both AMD and Intel to see how their new quad-core processors compare, but he said it appears Barcelona will put AMD in a very competitive position.
“It’s a significant upgrade to Opteron,” said Haff. “They’re doing it within the same socket as their dual core version, and I think we can expect a pretty significant performance upgrade.”
Haff said he sees the offering appealing to large data centres and other applications where high performance is important, although he emphasizes it’s not a specialty processor, but rather a very horizontal offering.
“This will clearly be the new top-end of AMD’s line, so whether we’re talking high performance computing or other types of large scale infrastructures, the fact this will be AMD’s performance leader that will make it more attractive to them,” said Haff, adding it will likely be an enterprise rather than an SMB play.
From a channel perspective, Haff said the Opteron quad-core will be the new high performance offering for AMD partners and allow them to offer performance and functionality improvements to their clients, but he added he doesn’t see a channel-specific play.
“This is a pretty broad horizontal offering that is going to be the new high-end of their processor line, so I don’t really see this being a particularly channel-oriented product,” said Haff. “It’s not as channel un-oriented product either. I don’t see any particular unusual channel ramifications one way or the other.”
