Apple

Intel sneaked out a new low-cost quad-core mobile processor on Monday, prompting some observers to wonder if Apple will finally release a quad-core laptop.

The lack of fanfare surrounding the 2.53GHz Core 2 Quad Mobile Processor Q9000's introduction--it was merely added to Intel's CPU price list--is certainly interesting. It's a slow news week between Christmas and New Year's, so why not play it up?, is how the logic goes.

APCMag.com says it's possible Apple's been waiting for the processor to arrive from Intel, and it just happens to coincide with Macworld next week.

That could also explain why Apple redesigned and upgraded its 13.3-inch MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro, but said little about the 17-inch MacBook Pro's eventual makeover.

So far Acer, which immediately announced a new laptop using Intel's newest processor, is the only PC maker that has confirmed it is using it.

The "complicated" design that AMD chose for Barcelona, its first quad-core server processor, caused more than six months of delays before the chip was ready, CEO Hector Ruiz told the San Jose Mercury News.

In an interview published in Sunday's Mercury News (the excerpts don't seem to be online yet), Ruiz said "every time we ran into a gotcha (or a technical glitch), it created a six-week-or-so hole in the schedule as we went back and fixed it. We hoped we wouldn't get many of those, but in the Barcelona case, we got more than we thought. By the time we got through fixing them all, we were six months-plus later from where we originally wanted to be."

That's been a very difficult six months for AMD, as its server division suffered through a price war without a fresh new product to parade before server buyers.

The September launch of Barcelona will come six months later than AMD had hoped, according to its CEO, Hector Ruiz.

(Credit: AMD)

AMD chose to put four processor cores on a single piece of silicon when creating Barcelona. The company thinks that this will deliver better performance than Intel's method of building a quad-core chip, but it was trickier to implement. Intel simply put two dual-core chips together in a single package, and while that won't win any awards from chip design purists, it did allow Intel to ship quad-core chips in November of last year. Barcelona is only now shipping to AMD's partners, and it will be formally launched on September 10, Ruiz confirmed.

The delay, along with Intel price cuts, forced AMD to significantly discount the prices of its dual-core server chips to compete and eroded its profits. You have to wonder whether AMD could have released a packaged quad-core chip months ago while still working on Barcelona if it had bit the bullet and given up on its "native quad-core" marketing strategy.

That might have erased AMD's biggest advantage over Intel: the integrated memory controller it uses to deliver a fast pipeline between the processor and system memory. And given AMD's manufacturing constraints late last year while waiting for its new 65-nanometer facility to come online in Dresden, packaged quad-core chips might not have been feasible.

But you've got to think that AMD would have loved to have any kind of quad-core design out earlier this year, so it could have competed against Intel's Xeon chips without having to resort to bargain basement pricing. And that might have been worth further delays to Barcelona, even though Intel is getting ready to launch its second-generation quad-core Penryn chip before Thanksgiving.

Intel is telling its resellers to get ready for new server chips in November.

DailyTech spotted a pricing list on an unprotected Web page at Intel's Reseller Center that reveals seven Xeon processors with 12MB of cache memory are scheduled to launch on November 11. The thing is, Intel doesn't have any server chips with 12MB of cache memory right now.

But the chipmaker has already disclosed that its Penryn generation of processors will have up to 12MBs of cache memory, making it pretty clear what to expect in November. All Intel has said is that Penryn chips are expected to arrive in the second half of the year. An Intel representative said he could not comment on rumors, and though the Web page has been pulled from Intel's site, I did see a copy before it died.

Penryn server processors will be Intel's first processors built on its 45-nanometer manufacturing technology, and will arrive a few months after AMD's first quad-core server chip launches in September. Intel already ships quad-core server chips, but they don't have as much cache memory as the Penryn chips will have.

Cache memory stores frequently used data right on the chip next to the CPU, so the CPU doesn't have to leave the chip and reach out to system memory to find that data. The more memory, the more data you can store on-chip and the less often the CPU has to leave the chip, improving performance. This is especially important for Intel given its reliance on a front-side bus to handle that interaction between the CPU and the memory, AMD uses an integrated memory controller that provides a direct link to the memory bank.

A source familiar with Intel's plans said to expect the Penryn chips to arrive before Thanksgiving, but that the November 11 date might not be exact. Desktop and notebook chips based on the same design are expected to arrive in the weeks following that launch.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Apparently sometimes, you just can't say no, even when you know it's going to hurt.

That seems to be where AMD finds itself, as it tries to reconcile a draining price war against the high demand for its chips. Intel has been squeezing AMD's margins for over a year through processor price cuts, but AMD has still managed to expand its foothold inside customers like Dell and gain new customers like Toshiba.

The problem is that much of that growth is coming at the low end of the market, where less profits can be had. Intel's decision to build quad-core chips more quickly than AMD has resulted in an "unfair fight" in which AMD has to compete against Intel's quad-core chips with dual-core chips, said Henri Richard, executive vice president and AMD's chief sales and marketing officer. It's the exact opposite of AMD's experience in 2005 in which it had dual-core server chips, and Intel didn't.

Right now, that means AMD can't play in the more expensive bands of the PC and server market since it doesn't have the quad-core chips. But does it mean that it has to dig itself more of a profit hole by pursuing market share on the low end of the market?

New customers like Dell and Toshiba require that AMD get that relationship off on the right foot by meeting their needs, Richard said. "We have customers, they are asking me to supply them with the products they need, and I can't just say no," he said in comments to reporters after AMD's Technology Analyst Day.

With all due respect, Henri, why not? Cutting prices to obtain market share has been an unfortunate part of AMD's history for years, but when CEO Hector Ruiz took over the reins from founder Jerry Sanders it seemed that the company had changed its tune.

Market share means a lot, but if you can't make any money selling products at that price, why take that deal? Dell had to learn this lesson in the PC market, ceding the lower unprofitable end of the market to other companies with leaner operating models.

The problem, of course, is that in this market there are only two suppliers. (Sorry, Via.) If Intel was unwilling to meet Dell and Toshiba's pricing demands, and those two PC makers turned to AMD, it would have been very hard for AMD to say no and disappoint the last two major PC companies on its wish list. Demand for AMD's chips soared in the second quarter compared with the first, but average prices did not improve.

Still, investors demand profits. "We're not chasing share for share's sake," Richard said. The company believes it can erase its losses and improve its average selling prices with the launch of its quad-core Barcelona chip in August, and new chips for desktops and notebooks over the next several months.

But the situation underscores how some parts of the PC market still see AMD in many respects: as the low-cost provider. AMD is working hard to change that perception, but a reputation can take awhile to shake.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--AMD will unveil a new chip design in 2009 for the server market and faster versions of its Barcelona quad-core chip later this year, company executives said Thursday.

AMD's near-term goal is to get its Barcelona quad-core chip out into the market. The company has already said it plans to launch Barcelona chips at 2GHz later this quarter, but it also plans to ship faster versions of those chips in the fourth quarter, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server products division, at a technology analyst meeting at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters.

The 2GHz launch speed had underwhelmed analysts who were expecting a faster debut from Barcelona, a quad-core server chip that AMD desperately needs to shore up the average selling prices of its server chips. Intel has been cutting into AMD's margins with its own quad-core chips, launched late last year as a package of two dual-core chips. Some purists considered that an inelegant design, but customers haven't seemed to mind.

Barcelona will come in three varieties, Allen said. The mainstream version will account for 77 percent of AMD's quad-core shipments and will debut at 2GHz. A more power-efficient version will debut at 1.9GHz, with faster speeds available later in the year, and a high-performance version will arrive in the fourth quarter at 2.3GHz or faster, he said.

But AMD also needs to show customers that it has a solid road map, so the company is trickling out details about future chips today.

Shanghai will come next year as a shrunken version of Barcelona built on AMD's 45-nanometer manufacturing technology. Both Shanghai and Barcelona will fit into chipsets that are currently available for AMD's dual-core chips.

And then, in 2009, AMD will come out with a new core design code-named Sandtiger and a new underlying platform timed to the uptake of DDR3 memory, Allen said. AMD's integrated memory controller design means that it has to tweak that controller every time a new memory standard becomes the king of the hill.

Sandtiger will use a new design Allen referred to as Direct Connect 2. This will involve four Hypertransport links on each chip, up from the current three, and will come with an AMD-designed server chipset.

Stay tuned for more details on AMD's future plans over the rest of the day. I'll update this post once I retrieve the thermal information for the three Barcelona varieties. AMD's apparently planning to show us 14 million PowerPoint slides today, and they are whizzing past.

UPDATED 10:05 a.m.: AMD let us take a coffee break, during which I found out that Sandtiger will be an eight-core processor built on the 45nm manufacturing technology. Like Barcelona, it will also be a monolithic design with eight cores all integrated onto a single chip.

AMD Chief Technology Officer Phil Hester smiled when asked just how large a chip that would be, declining to specify a die size but assuring me it would be "economically attractive." The surface area of a processor is a huge factor in manufacturing and profitability, since the larger the chip, the fewer number of chips you can cut from a silicon wafer. Jim McGregor, an analyst with In-Stat, hinted that AMD would likely have a fundamentally new--and smaller--core design for that generation to make the manufacturing folks happy.

Intel's running a special on quad-core chips this summer just ahead of the back-to-school rush.

The company cut the price of its Core 2 Quad Q6600 (PDF) processor in half on Monday, just a week after it introduced a new quad-core chip for desktop PC customers. This is how it has worked in the chip game for years: new processors push older ones down a series of pricing steps until they become obsolete.

Quad-core desktop chips are now cheaper, but still overpriced for most.

(Credit: Intel)

But while $266 may seem like a bargain (though remember, that's the 1,000-unit price), most PC users don't need four cores. Unless you like to play PC games while editing videos, running antivirus software and recording a television show, you simply don't need that level of performance yet.

If you're all about future proofing, $266 isn't a terrible deal for a quad-core chip that you won't max out until a few years down the road. But there's not much PC software out there right now that can take advantage of four processing cores; the industry's just getting around to figuring out how to use two.

If you're multitasking to a ridiculous degree like the example above, then you'll come closer to filling those cores. If you're just browsing the Web, typing up a term paper or playing PC games from time to time, you don't need four cores.

If you need a desktop PC for back-to-school, you want an Intel system and you don't fall into the multitasker category, save about 100 bucks and buy one of the E6750 or E6550 dual-core Core 2 Duo processors that cost $163. You'll get a faster front-side bus (the connection between the chip and memory) than the quad-core chips, which will immediately improve the performance of the zillions of programs that are memory-intensive. Take the $100 you saved and buy more memory.