14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices has just unveiled its new series of quad-core server chips, and rumors about eight-core processors have already started to pop up. According to Randy Allen, corporate vice president of server and workstation division at AMD, the eight-core chips are slated to arrive in 2009.
Before the wight-core behemoths arrive, AMD will release its 45-nanometer quad-core line-up, codenamed Shanghai. The chips will arrive later this year, most probably in the late-second or early-third quarter. The octa-core counterparts will be known as Montreal and will kick in during the next year. The Montreal processors will be seated on a completely new socket platform, called the G3.
Allen also claimed that the Shanghai micro-architecture will be able to deliver superior computing performance as compared to the current generation of Barcelona chips, with higher instructions per clock (IPC). More than that, the upcoming 45-nanometer silicon will also come with a larger L3 cache pool of 6 MB (at the moment, AMD is using a 2MB L3 cache).
The chip manufacturer estimates that the company's eight-core processors will be facing increased demand on the enterprise-level server market, as well as in data-centers, where processing power is a critical aspect.
Although the company did not state it, the new technology might put AMD in line with Intel on the server processor market and will recover for Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. At the moment, AMD does not have a similar multithreading technology, a trend that is becoming increasingly popular.
"It is very clear that most server workloads are multi-tasking, not really multi-threaded," Mr. Allen is reported to have said.
AMD executives are extremely optimistic about the company's roadmap. However, it would not be the first time for the chip manufacturer to talk about its state-of the-art technology, then fail to deliver it when close to completion.