AMD Has Nothing Nice to Say About Intel's Dunnington

Intel has certainly made the headlines this week with the official introduction of its first 6-core Xeon processors. Codenamed Dunnington, these new CPUs, part of the company's Xeon 7400 series of chips, have been already integrated in several server systems designed by major vendors, including HP, Dell, Sun and IBM. As it was to be expected, AMD had its say on its rival's new 45nm-based Xeon processors, and as it turns out, the Sunnyvale-based chip maker isn't all that impressed.

 

Jon Fruehe, worldwide market development manager at AMD, told tgdaily that the Dunnington should be considered as a 'benchmark chip', designed to hit the benchmark charts and a "placeholder" until Intel can jump off the FB-DIMM train.

 

Talking about the new Xeon 7400-family of processors, Fruehe has stated that Intel's achievement on delivering the first six-core chip isn't all that important. That is because, Fruehe believes that this is really just a glued-together triple-dual-core processor that packs an extra 50% more cores than the quad-core, costs 50% more and can only provide 30% more performance. In addition, Fruehe also took on the chips' 130 watt thermal design power, which he claims won't make much sense for most consumers as high-performance multi-socket processors make up for a total of 5% of the market.

 

He also said that, aside from the power issues, the Dunnington will also deliver some performance problems, due to the fact that it lacks an integrated memory controller, which, he says, will certainly translate into a bottleneck.

 

It is rather usual that companies criticize their rival's products, but the fact of the matter is, Intel has certainly managed to deliver a new high-performance chip, an advantage that the company will maintain for some time. That is because AMD is expected to release its first native 6-core processor, codenamed Instanbul, sometime next year. However, by the end of the year the Sunnyvale-based chip maker should finally unveil its Shanghai CPUs, which will come in the form of 45nm-based quad-core Opterons.