14 DAY TRIAL // The year that is about to end has brought nothing but trouble to the chip manufacturer. AMD faced an alarming drop in the market share, combined with an enormous financial loss that pushed the company on the edge of the precipice.
All the company's troubles have the same origin: two failed products that were supposed to bring significant income. Neither the desktop oriented Phenoms, nor the enterprise Barcelona chips stayed on the market due to a design flaw. The repeated delays in getting the quad-core Opteron processors on the market weakened customers' confidence in the company.
AMD must work hard over the next six months to achieve some important goals in the company roadmap. It is vital for the chip manufacturer to start volume shipments of Barcelona processors, a move that would bring both revenue and market share in the enterprise sector.
Switching to 45-nanometer manufacturing process will be the next logical step, and AMD has already scheduled Shanghai, the second version of the Quad-Core Opteron chip, for mass-availability in the second quarter of 2008.
The new technology will allow AMD to triple the size of the L3 cache pool, from 2MB (Barcelona) to 6MB. The L3 cache is a memory pool shared between the processor's four cores. When the data is moved out of the Level 2 cache, it is deposited into the L3 pool for faster access. Moreover, both Barcelona and Shanghai chips feature an on-chip memory controller to boost the processor's performance.
According to the executive vice president of AMD's Computing Products Group, Mario Rivas, the first samples of Shanghai are about to leave the Dresden factory in January next year, and any delay would prevent the chips from entering mass-manufacturing until late 2008 or early 2009.
The desktop and mobile computing sectors also require AMD's extended attention. The first quarter of 2008 will bring the Perseus platform, comprised of a quad-core processor and an RS780 or SB700 chipset for the corporate market. Puma, the AMD mobile platform, is slated for the second quarter of the next year. The new platform is based on a new processor, called Griffin, and is the company's response to Intel's Santa Rosa.
Additional details about the company's roadmap will emerge after the Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas in January next year.