AMD is busy today

Peter G. 13 Nov, 2008 at 2:42pm ET Article published in Tech

Lots of talk from the AMD camp today about three big items. Shanghai, the company’s first 45nm server processors are officially out today. It’s 20 – 30 percent faster than the ill-fated Barcelona it replaces, boasts increased clock speeds and the same power usage along with a host of tweaks and refinements. But word is that Shanghai tends to pull ahead of Intel’s Penryn-based chips in floating point calculations and remains competitive against them in other areas. HP and Dell will be using the new processors in their servers and AMD is saying Cray will use them for supercomputers.

Today also marks the announcement of AMD’s shot at taking on the Intel Atom. This afternoon, AMD is expected to spill the beans on an attractive netbook CPU that’ll trounce all over the Atom in terms of performance, losing out only to it in battery life. The Inquirer expects it to be attractive to OEMs because it’ll be inexpensive and undercuts Intel’s policy to protect its own products from competing with each other. We’ll see more as the day progresses.

Finally and most important for most of us, the first work on AMD’s next desktop platform is hitting today. Spider will be a thing of the past. We’re moving on to Dragon Q1 2009. The Dragon platform will feature 45nm Phenom II X4 processors on AMD 700-series chipsets coupled with ATI 4000-series graphics, says CNET.

Update!
The aforementioned mobile netbook setup is called the Yukon. A sub-25W TDP and a 1H09 release is suggested but not much more info came out today. What did happen is AMD updated its roadmap. Here’s what they’re showing:

The Puma’s successor is the Tigris and it’ll hit 2H09. It’ll be 45nm and coupled with a mobile 780 chipset.
Two very boring sounding desktops are scheduled for late 2009 too; the Kodiak for business and Pisces for consumers. It’s more 45nm stuff that’s energy saving that is otherwise pedestrian.
Dragon will support AMD Stream, OverDrive, and Fusion for Gaming technologies. Stream allows your GPU to work with the CPU for increased performance, OverDrive is for overclocking and Fusion for Gaming bumps your video card speeds and stops background tasks while gaming.
2010 will be the year everything moves to DDR3.
2011 will be 32nm duals and quads.

The Inquirer has photos of the slide show that show the info in a bit more detail.

Comments

13 Nov 2008 ~ 3:33pm Leonardo This very good news, insofar as releases are actually made. 45nm is on time, am I correct?

"Dragon" and the competitor to Atom - proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I have to say though, that AMD's announcements have more substance of late than they did a year ago. PR and "announcements" until recently were more fantasy than reality. I think AMD may have come back down to Earth!

Let's hope for a competitive AMD.

Hmm, OK, this sounds more like fantasy than reality - "an attractive netbook CPU thatâ€™ll trounce all over the Atom in terms of performance." So, Intel is just to sit still while AMD works on this?
13 Nov 2008 ~ 4:49pm Thrax Intel already has a successor for Silverthorne (Atom) in the works called Moorestown. What I imagine we'll see is a back and forth as AMD leapfrogs Silverthorne and then Moorestown leapfrogs AMD's goods.

(Woot! Commenting from my BlackBerry!)
13 Nov 2008 ~ 5:15pm Leonardo

What I imagine we'll see is a back and forth as AMD leapfrogs Silverthorne and then Moorestown leapfrogs AMD's goods.

That's EXACTLY what I'd like to see - both companies remain competitive and financially solvent for the long term.
13 Nov 2008 ~ 5:25pm BuddyJ I've updated the news post to reflect AMD showing off the new roadmap which goes up to 2011.
13 Nov 2008 ~ 8:12pm Komete Just fyi.. I'm getting a 404 not found when I click on the link from the main page..

I was thinking good news was around the corner with all the possession changes. I just hope their desktop processors will be able to overclock in the high 3ghz realm. That would win back a lot of people. Myself included. These server chip's look promising.
13 Nov 2008 ~ 8:44pm Linc Komete, thanks for the heads up. There was a glitch in the front page from some work I'm doing right now. It should be corrected now
13 Nov 2008 ~ 11:47pm BuddyJ The Shanghai has made a pretty good showing, but reports on the Deneb 45m Phenoms are all over the place. Some say they'll do over 4GHz on air. Other say they barely get into the 3GHz range and are only 5 percent faster than the current Phenoms. It'll be a game of wait and see. Rumors say we'll see them the second week of January, but there's no confirmation.

Did anyone else notice besides me that the 6 and 8 core processors that made the news a few months ago are now lacking from the roadmap? Kinda goes to show that AMD doesn't think it'll be able to touch Intel through the 45nm cycle, and further solidifies the speculation that the company is going all-in on trying to build a kick butt 32nm chip.
14 Nov 2008 ~ 1:49am Komete

Buddy J wrote:

Did anyone else notice besides me that the 6 and 8 core processors that made the news a few months ago are now lacking from the roadmap?

I did notice that but on the roadmap there is one that says >4 cores meaning more than 4 cores. Look at 2011. They may have taken it off the table for now to focus on other areas, like laptops and the ultra portable segment.

I too have seen those reports of hitting 4ghz and read about the return of the FX line. It sounded liek the perfect thing and the perfect range for amd to be shooting for. Just sounded too good to be true. I'm just hoping for an AMD quad/tri core that can hit 3.5ghz reliably. I'll wait before I upgrade but if they don't deliver than I'll probably get a core duo. My overclocked AMD x2 is really behind the times. I can still play any game out but I need something with more oomf for CAD.
14 Nov 2008 ~ 12:42pm QCH I'm looking forward to seeing Intel and AMD getting back to even ground or at least the same zip code. AMD lost too much ground over the past few years.

Thrax wrote:

(Woot! Commenting from my BlackBerry!)

side note... with what app? I hate browsing from my BB Curve.