14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro devices hardly managed to pose a threat for the chip manufacturer Intel lately, but recent information shows that the company is far from waving the surrender flag. Intel's pre-briefing conference for the upcoming Spring Developers Forum in China revealed Intel's next goals on the company's roadmap. However, AMD might have quite some hidden aces up its sleeve.
According to Randy Allen, Corporate Vice President of the Server and Workstation Division at AMD, Intel's Nehalem chip is just the company's attempt at catching up with AMD's existing technology. He claims that the Barcelona server processors are currently shipping to a large amount of OEM and system integrators worldwide, and it is expected to sell extremely well.
The upcoming Nehalem chips will come with Intel's Quick Path Interconnect, which is a clone of AMD's HyperTransport 3.0 technology, and this is just one of the aspects that Intel is trying to copy. The Nehalem architecture also was inspired from AMD's cache structure, with small per-core Level 1 and Level 2 caches, that are both connected to a large shared Level 3 cache pool.
"We have level three cache, we've had integrated memory since 2003 and high speed serial links since 2006. I don't think there is anything new here," claimed Allen.
As far as the upcoming six-cored monster in the Dunnington family is concerned, AMD claims that they have the right weapons to defeat it. AMD's upcoming Shanghai chip will be manufactured at the 45-nanometer process node, and Allen claims that it will come with extra features, such as an enhanced HyperTransport interconnect and native support for DDR3 memory.
"We'll have four cores by the end of the year and you can expect to see eight cores in the 2009 timeframe," Allen concluded.