14 DAY TRIAL // When Advanced Micro Devices officially launched their quad core central processing units two days ago, most of the server manufacturers felt just a little bit cheated as the company presented only processors with a low clock speed, which tops at 2.0GHz. AMD stated that higher clocked quad core processors based on the Barcelona architecture are going be become available in about two months and they will sport frequencies of around 2.5GHz as its rival company, Intel, already has plans for a new line of Xeon processors based on the 45 nanometer fabrication process which should leave the quad core Opterons far behind in benchmarks and real world applications.
Presently, the top speed of an AMD quad core Opteron processor is 2.0GHz, but Randy Allen, vice president and general manager of AMD's server and workstation division, said that a new line of processors featuring speeds up to 2.5Ghz will be available in December, together with the quad core desktop processor line of products, the Phenoms.
Even without the increase in clock speed, AMD claims that its native quad core processor design offers a better price per performance ratio and a much lower power consumption than Intel's server intended processors that run at generally higher clock speeds. While the manufacturing company expects strong Opteron sales, market analysts are stating that AMD will benefit mostly from large shipments to server manufacturers that are already using its hardware platform, as the new generation of Opteron CPUs is socket compatible with the previous dual core processors. Because of this backward compatibility, server manufacturers will not need to radically alter the design of their mainboards.
Another good point which comes with this backward compatibility is that companies already having deployed dual core Opterons can easily upgrade their systems for increased performance while keeping costs down, especially in the energy efficiency department. Apart from the faster 2.5GHz operating quad core processors designed for server use, AMD plans to launch in December the desktop version of the quad core architecture too. The desktop intended version of the quad core design will be called Phenom and it will be available under the commercial name of AMD Phenom FX-80, FX-90 and FX-91.
The Phenoms will be clocked pretty high from the start, high for an AMD made processor that is, as they are expected to operate at speeds between 2.2GHz and 2.6GHz, while featuring 1MB of L2 cache memory for every processing core and a shared third level of cache that amounts to 2MB. The integrated memory controller which is the trademark of the new generations of AMD CPUs will support dual channel memory configurations and DDR2 random access memory with speeds up to 1066MHz. Unlike the current generation of dual core desktop CPUs, the Phenoms will come packed in the AM2+ form factor and the FX-90 and FX-91 processors will also work in dual processor configurations.