Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

Let bygones be bygones. That's what Advanced Micro Devices is hoping for with the roll-out of its first 45-nanometer processor Thursday.

(AMD also announced its upcoming 45-nanometer "Phenom II X4" desktop technology. See below.)

The No. 2 PC processor supplier will make the case that Shanghai is not Barcelona. The latter chip--AMD's first quad-core processor--was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare but then faced prolonged delays. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market. (AMD lost more than five percentage points to Intel in the server market during the third quarter of this year, according to various reports.)

AMD Shanghai die

"Barcelona was obviously a pretty rough start for them. And that does not appear to be the case for Shanghai," said Dean McCarron, the principal and founder of Mercury Research, a company that tracks chip market movements. "One of the big distinctions was they wanted to be absolutely sure that Shanghai was ready to go."

Shanghai is not a new architecture but essentially a refresh of AMD's Barcelona Opteron chip. AMD claims Shanghai is 35 percent faster than Barcelona without using more energy. The chip is being built on 45-nanometer process technology, while Barcelona was a 65-nanometer part. Typically, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the processor.

Major customers are brimming with accolades for Shanghai. "We've been very pleased. Thrilled with their execution," said with Paul Gottsegen, vice president of Industry Standard Servers, HP, in an interview.

"We'll have products that will be shipping just after launch. We had high performance expectations for the product and it exceeded our expectations," he said. "We're going to put Shanghai across the meat of our product line. You'll see six different rack servers, three different blades, all up and down parts of our product line."

And HP likes the fact that Shanghai is more power efficient, a critical metric for many server applications. "We're seeing a significantly higher performance-per-watt over previous-generation AMD," Gottsegen said.

HP would not comment on AMD's checkered quad-core past. In response to a question about drawing a comparison with AMD's Barcelona launch last September and Shanghai, Gottsegen would not comment. "This is their Shanghai launch. I want to focus on Shanghai," he said.

Cray is also expected to use Shanghai in its supercomputers, according to AMD.

Both HP and Dell are targeting Shanghai processors specifically for virtualization, which allows a data center to reduce the number of physical servers. Shanghai has a silicon "assist" that facilitates virtualization.

Praise from vendors doesn't necessarily translate into market success, however. Especially when the market is going south in a hurry. "We have a demand-falling-off-the-cliff scenario," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart.

"Shanghai, which in a normal environment may have had a window of opportunity, it's not likely to do so today," Kumar said. "By the time demand recovers in the second half of next year, Intel will be fielding their (next-generation) Nehalem product," Kumar added, referring to Intel's server version of the Nehalem processor.

Shanghai Opteron processors are available immediately, the company said. The 75-watt versions of the processor range from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz in clock speed. Enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE (55-watt) and SE (105-watt) processors are planned for the first quarter of 2009, AMD said.

Shanghai technology ahead of Intel

Much of Shanghai's raw technology is a generation ahead of Intel. In a posting at EE Times, Don Scansen, a semiconductor technology analyst at Semiconductor Insights, said that many of the features that Intel is touting as new are not new to AMD and were initially introduced in AMD's Barcelona processor.

"Intel's Nehalem is due out soon, but many of the features of what has widely been touted as a 'new' architecture are only new to Intel," he writes.

"There is no question that Intel is at the cutting edge of process (manufacturing) technology, but that's not true for architecture. Intel probably decided it made more sense to introduce a highly integrated, quad-core design on 45nm rather than 65nm just to keep the chip size down. Whatever the reasons, the introduction of Intel's Nehalem architecture will come more than a year later than AMD's Barcelona."

Scansen says that, among other things, AMD has reduced the "die footprint" (chip size) by more than 10 percent, despite doubling the total cache memory from 4MB to 8MB.

Upcoming 45nm desktop processors

AMD plans to bring Shanghai 45nm processor technology to the desktop PC market in Q1 2009 with a platform codenamed "Dragon."

"This platform will be the second-generation AMD performance desktop platform, featuring all next-generation components in comparison to the first-generation AMD 'Spider' platform released in 2008," AMD said in a statement.

The Dragon platform will combine 45nm AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core processors with AMD 700 Series chipsets and ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics.

Advanced Micro Devices' first 45-nanometer chip, the Shanghai quad-core Opteron, has made its debut at resellers.

The officially unannounced Opteron 837X and 838X series processors are not cheap. Online reseller PC Connection lists the Opteron QC (quad-core) 8384 at $2,509. Another reseller, Buy.com lists the same processor at $2,240.

The 8384 is expected to run at 2.7GHz and draw 75 watts, relatively low power consumption for a quad-core server processor.

The 8385--same clock speed with a faster system bus--is offered for $2,509 at PC Connection.

Other processors listed include the 8382 (2.6GHz), 8380 (2.5GHz), and 8378 (2.4GHz), priced at $2,177, $1,768, and $1,360 respectively at PC Connection. Note that these prices will differ from official pricing from AMD.

The Shanghai Opteron 230X series includes the 2382 (2.6GHz) and 2380 (2.5GHz). These are priced at $1,019 and $814 respectively at PC Connnection.

Rollout of the chip is expected officially on November 13, according to industry sources.

AMD is hoping to make a much better impression with Shanghai. Its first quad-core chip, Barcelona, was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare only to be delayed a whopping eight months (or more, depending how the delay is calculated) due to production glitches and bugs. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market.

Shanghai is in full production right now, Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business said last month. The was confirmed during AMD's earnings conference call earlier this month.

Server vendors are expected to be shipping systems as early as this quarter. A Sun Microsystems spokesperson said Tuesday that it plans to offer Shanghai processors on its current x64 platforms running Barcelona. Systems using the new processors are targeted for the first quarter of 2009, the spokesperson said.

At the same clock frequency (speed), Shanghai will outperform Barcelona by about 20 percent, Patla said last month.

AMD is also boosting the size of the cache memory, which typically speeds performance, from 2 megabytes to 6 megabytes. Another speed improvement will come from increasing "instructions per clock."

Patla also said last month that AMD is "turning on HT3 (HyperTransport 3)"--a communication path between chips--and that partners will start to validate systems in the first quarter of next year with this technology.

AMD said Monday it is set to roll out its next-generation "Shanghai" chip--minus the mistakes of the last generation.

The No. 2 processor maker wants to make one thing crystal clear: Shanghai is not Barcelona. The latter chip was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare only to be delayed a whopping eight months (or more, depending how the delay is calculated) due to production glitches and bugs. The chip was also hampered by speed (core clock frequency) limitations. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market.

"We had some mis-starts in getting Barcelona to market and wanted to bring as much velocity to Shanghai as possible. Learn from our mistakes and, as a company, never do that again," said Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business.

Shanghai--a quad-core product targeted at servers--will be AMD's first 45-nanometer processor. (Barcelona is 65-nanometer.) Typically, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the chip. Intel has been shipping 45-nanometer processors since last year and these processors now make up most of Intel's offerings.

AMD needs Shanghai to succeed. It is reeling from a string of losses and is on the verge of announcing . "To bring it back to profitability the execution of the server product line is absolutely critical," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. "That is really their only profit pool."

Intel has upstaged Advanced Micro Devices at DreamWorks Animation. The movie studio has decided to drop AMD and go with processors from Intel, citing better performance and a more promising roadmap.

DreamWorks specifically mentioned Intel's upcoming Nehalem processor and Larrabee graphics chip as reasons for the switch.

Intel and DreamWorks announced Tuesday that they had formed a strategic alliance for 3D filmmaking technology. DreamWorks plans to produce all its feature films in stereoscopic 3D--which requires the viewer to wear special glasses for enhanced 3D--beginning next year. Intel will provide DreamWorks with "the latest high-performance processing technologies, including future chips with multiple processing cores," the companies said.

This is a setback for AMD. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker rolled out its quad-core Barcelona last year at George Lucas' Lucasfilm campus in San Francisco to make a point: Barcelona would be big player in the movie industry. But a series of delays related to a processor bug put a damper on the high expectations for Barcelona.

"AMD maintained a long and fruitful relationship with DreamWorks Animation, beginning in early 2005. Earlier this year, AMD and DreamWorks decided not to extend our marketing and technology relationship. However, DreamWorks Animation is still an important and respected AMD customer and we look forward to having the opportunity to work with them again in the future," AMD said in a statement.

Essentially, DreamWorks looked down the road and liked what it saw coming from Intel better. "When we look at the Intel roadmap, it is more closely aligned with our needs," John Batter, president of production at DreamWorks Animations, said during a conversation with Nanotech: The Circuits blog. "The rendering times have been going up because of the complexity and richness of the images. Then you layer on top of that 3D. Something that's already growing--and doubling it."

Intel had the best technology, Batter said. "You need a lot more horsepower. On Intel's upcoming generation, the number of cores is going to help us satiate the big spike in our needs."

DreamWorks had been in a three-year partnership with AMD, Batter said.

He explained that Intel is also helping DreamWorks to redesign its animation tools. "Our animation tools are all proprietary here. Intel is rearchitecting our software tools...to take advantage of multicore and make our renderer highly scalable as well as making our character animation tools highly scalable."

DreamWorks uses rendering farms with as many as 5,000 cores to create animation and its tools need to be adapted to the increasing number of processor cores, Batter said. The Nehalem chip, for example, is expected to integrate as many as eight cores. Currently, Intel offers no more than four cores per chip. Larrabee is expected by many to offer as many as 32 cores.

Intel Nehalem architecture

(Credit: Intel)

Batter specifically mentioned both Nehalem and Larrabee as a reason for the switch to Intel. He said that Larrabee would be "complementary" to Intel's general-purpose CPUs.

Nehalem is due in the fourth quarter of this year and Larrabee is expected in the 2009-2010 time frame.

The first Intel-Dreamworks release will be Monsters vs. Aliens, which is slated to hit movie theaters in March 2009.

On Monday, Advanced Micro Devices announced availability of low-power quad-core Opteron processors targeted at servers.

AMD quad-core Opteron

(Credit: AMD)

The HE (high-efficiency) processors have a thermal envelope of 55 watts. Other AMD quad-core server processors have higher thermal envelopes of 105 watts or 75 watts.

The low-power Opterons are available in both the 2300 and 8300 series. The 2300 series processors are designed for servers that use two processors, while the 8300 series processors are for systems that use four or eight processors.

The new parts include the 8347 HE (1.9GHz, $873) and the 2347 HE (1.9GHz, $377).

"Our new Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE processors were designed to help data center managers who see power consumption and virtualization as the keys to solving their overall performance equation," Randy Allen, general manager at AMD's Server and Workstation Division, said in a statement.

Intel announced in March energy-efficient quad-core Xeon processors with a thermal envelope of 50 watts at core frequencies as high as 2.50GHz.

Intel has hit a milestone of 10 million quad-core processors shipped. But this time Advanced Micro Devices--with the worst apparently behind it--appears ready to respond. The No. 2 processor manufacturer is about to add Sun Microsystems and IBM to its quad-core customer list.

Intel quad-core 7300 series processor

(Credit: Intel)

Intel has shipped more than 10 million quad-core processors to date, including more than 3.5 million units shipped in the first quarter of 2008, according to market researcher Mercury Research. "Intel's 10 million unit milestone reflects the benefits (of) the rapid move to 45nm (manufacturing), allowing quad-core processors to become much more prevalent in the company's high performance product mix," said Dean McCarron, founder and principal analyst of Mercury Research in a statement.

But the days of Intel having large quad-core market segments virtually to itself are over. Hewlett-Packard and Dell now offer servers with AMD's "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processor.

And server giants Sun Microsystems and IBM are next. Both companies said they are getting set to ship Barcelona-based servers, according to company spokespeople. Sun Microsystems said it will ship systems in May and IBM said systems will appear "this summer."

AMD has long claimed that its quad-core chip has advantages over Intel because of a built-in memory controller--for better memory sharing across many processors--and strong floating point performance. These are the very reasons the Texas Advanced Computing Center selected AMD's quad-core Barcelona processors for its supercomputer that will house more than 60,000 processors when it's completed.

That said, AMD has a lot of catching up to do. Though the company said in its first-quarter 2008 earnings conference call that it shipped more than half a million quad-core processors in that quarter (about 100,000 more than the fourth quarter of 2007), eight months have past since Barcelona was introduced (September, 2007). And until recently the only takers of quad-core Barcelona chips had been select high-performance computing (HPC) customers such as the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Mainstream server vendors had put off Barcelona deployment because of the now-infamous "TLB" processor bug, among other issues. Phenom quad-core processors, on the other hand, have been shipping to system builders for a few months.

The problem is that Intel has pulled way ahead of AMD in the interim. "Intel is a full (manufacturing) process generation ahead," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at CRT Capital Group. A growing percentage of Intel processors shipped to customers are built on the 45-nanometer (nm) processor while AMD is shipping 65nm chips. AMD is slated to shift to 45nm at the end of this year.

Advanced Micro Devices said the long-delayed quad-core "Barcelona" Opteron processor is available in servers from computer vendors such as Hewlett-Packard.

HP G5 server series

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

Barcelona had been delayed repeatedly due to production glitches and bugs. AMD is now shipping a "B3" version that includes the bug fix in silicon.

"Customers can get the quad-core AMD Opteron processor today in systems from HP, as well as other system providers," the chipmaker said in a release Tuesday night. The HP ProLiant G5 servers are the first of many systems that are expected to be available in the coming weeks from global OEMs and system builders, AMD said.

The Opteron 8300 Series is currently available in select HP servers at speeds of 2.2GHz (model 8354) and 2.3GHz (model 8356). Opteron 8300 series processors are targeted at multiprocessor servers that typically use four processors (16 cores).

AMD has updated its pricing with the 8360 (2.5GHz) listed at $2,149, the 8358 (2.4Hz) at $1,865, the 8356 at $1,514, and the 8354 at $1,165.

AMD also lists quad-core Opteron 2300 series processors, starting at $316 for the 2352 (2.1GHz) and ranging up to $1,156 for the 2360 (2.5Ghz). These are used typically in two-processor systems.

The quad-core 1300 series for single-processor systems ranges in price from the 1352 listed at $209 to the 1356 listed at $377.

"We are proud to be the first OEM to market with quad-core AMD Opteron processor-based servers," Paul Gottsegen, vice president of marketing for industry-standard servers at HP, said in a prepared statement.

Systems are also expected from IBM, Dell, and Sun Microsystems. IBM and Sun Microsystems have had systems waiting to take the chips since fall of last year.

Barcelona-based computers are also available from smaller vendors such as Rackable Systems and Supermicro, AMD said.

The chipmaker said Monday that it would reduce its workforce by 10 percent this year and that it expects to post first-quarter revenue of $1.5 billion, about 15 percent lower than the fourth quarter and well below seasonal declines.

AMD's processor business has been in the dumps for well over a year. But a resumption of quad-core shipments and a reduction in its workforce, though painful, may signal a turnaround.

AMD quad-core Opteron finally on its way to computer makers

(Credit: AMD)

Before we get to the good news, let's first consider a draconian scenario for Advanced Micro Devices. As the chipmaker was announcing Monday that it would lay off 1,650 employees later this year, the stock was hovering just above $6, down from the mid-$20s a year ago and about $40 two years ago. If things do not improve, the company may split in two, according to Ashok Kumar, an analyst at CRT Capital Group.

Kumar sees one scenario in which AMD bifurcates into a manufacturing concern and a design company. If earnings don't trend up by the second half, this is a real possibility according to Kumar. "They don't have too many options with the debt overhang (from the ATI acquisition)," he said. The soft economy may not help matters either.

Kumar listed the well-known reasons for AMD's profit shortfalls: Lack of competitive offerings, blended ASPs (average selling prices) well below Intel's, and the delayed ramp of the high-end quad-core Opteron.

But these negatives--so the upbeat narrative on AMD goes--are the chipmaker's past, not its future. After a very long delay (about one year), AMD's quad-core Barcelona for servers is just about set to ship to the largest computer companies in the world: IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Dell, among others. "Barcelona ASPs are 300 (dollars) plus. That historically has been the profit pool of the company," Kumar said. Once AMD ramps Barcelona and the desktop quad-core Phenom, things should "dramatically improve," he said.

And AMD's mobile offerings are getting better too. "They were probably at their weakest point in 2007," said Dean McCarron, founder and principal of Mercury Research. "The next design cycle for notebooks is happening right now. You can safely say that they are more competitive than they were last year" vis-a-vis Nvidia, he said.

Along these lines, AMD is slated to bring out the "Puma" mobile platform this quarter. Puma is based on the RS780M chipset and AMD's dual-core Griffin processor--now called the Turion Ultra. The new Turion is all about power consumption (to reduce power, each core can run at different frequencies) while the RS780M, AMD claims, is up to five times faster than Intel's current X3100 integrated graphics silicon.

Partnerships may also be helping AMD in the mobile market. "They've been partnering with some of the most aggressive OEMs out there. That plays to their favor," said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat. "Companies like Acer and Toshiba have been extremely aggressive worldwide, especially in North America, at gaining market share," he said.

The desktop is looking better too, with the triple-core and quad-core Phenom processors just beginning to ship in volume.

All this optimism is cautious, of course. "The competitive environment that they're in now is a little bit different than the one that they were in before. Intel is much stronger," said McCarron. "We have Nehalem (the next-generation Intel microarchitecture) coming at the tail end of the year and the Penryn products are very competitive," he added.

AMD also said Monday that it expects to post first-quarter revenue of $1.5 billion, about 15 percent lower than the fourth quarter. This is well below seasonal declines. So upcoming earnings could be ugly in some respects. "Plus the pullback in consumer and business spending. Q2 tends to be a little bit low in terms of revenues," McGregor warned, referring to factors that affect both Intel and AMD. "They're facing a little bit of headwind in terms of economic and spending conditions."

And all of the positives cited above may happen slowly for AMD. "Things don't swing overnight. They take time," McGregor said.

The biggest flops flop big because of hype. Supposedly sure bets get massively pumped up, then poop out fast. Ishtar couldn't lose with Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, but it lost Columbia Pictures $40 million. Heaven's Gate was an "epic film" that lost $44 million, forcing Transamerica to sell off United Artists.

Boondoggled technology can be even more of a financial disaster, marketed year after year, at great expense, until one day the company either pulls the plug or relegates it to practical oblivion. With this in mind, I have come up with a few chips that have been hyped far beyond what was delivered. Some are still in the process of flopping (but may ultimately redeem themselves, somehow, as 20th Century Fox's Cleopatra did).

Cyrix 5x86 "M1" processor

(Credit: Photographer: Dirk Oppelt )

First, a short preface. A post was brought to my attention a few weeks ago. The point was essentially this: A decade or so ago, Cyrix's M1 and M2 processors were hyped as the fastest, most powerful chips when they were really no such thing. Reality caught up with the hype, and, to use the author's own words, "Cyrix imploded and National Semiconductor blew I-don't-know-how-many-billion dollars cleaning up the mess."

The author also implies that the press too often buys the hype. Let's see. When I'm faced, for example, with a new chip that looks like a dog, I don't write something the next day saying so. Even if the company's marketing department is knowingly putting lipstick on the dog (or the pig, take your choice) I won't necessarily know this right away. So, I give them the benefit of the doubt. Until I know otherwise of course.

This is best illustrated by, not coincidentally, the Cyrix M1 processor. When I covered Cyrix, I'm sure I wrote stories overstating the threat the M1 posed to Intel. But it didn't take long to figure out that the M1 was not what Cyrix said it was. The moment of truth happened at a San Francisco chip conference. The die for the M1 had recently been released. And it was big. As in oversize. I remember discussing this with a chip analyst and while the exact phraseology escapes me, I believe concepts such "big" and "hot" and "waffle iron" were bandied about. My reaction was this: OK, so the marketing is fraudulent. But the company is small and they seem to be struggling. Plus, they do have one large customer planning to use their chips (why, I don't know) but I won't write a piece tomorrow slamming the waffle-iron-size die, I just won't take them seriously anymore.

So, how many M1s have come and gone over the years? And how many are out there now? That's what I will try to address here, the first of a series of posts focusing on flops. With one very important disclaimer: This is opinion, and opinion only.

Cyrix M1/M2: In addition to what is stated above, let me say this: Even back in the mid-'90s when I didn't know how bad the M2 (the successor to the M1) would be, I would have never purchased a computer with a Cyrix processor no matter how inexpensive. Why? Simple, the chips were slow.

The Intel Itanium : The hype: "This design...will one day replace RISC and CISC. It is a gateway into the 64-bit future" or "I expect Itanium to replace Xeon, but not until 2003." The reality: Development took place over 11 years, from 1989 to 2001. Despite this, when it was released it was not competitive. Not many were sold (some claim only a few thousand original Itaniums) because of relatively poor performance, in addition to poor yields and high cost. Then the other shoe dropped with Itanium 2. In September 2005, Dell said it would phase out its remaining models based on the Itanium--"another sign of the waning interest in a chip that cost an estimated several billion dollars to develop" (The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 15, 2005). In short, AMD's Opteron was a lot better.

The original version of the "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron: This is a work in progress so I don't want to be too harsh. Barcelona may ultimately succeed as the B3 stepping is adopted over the coming months. So here I will simply focus on the initial hype. The hype: "Barcelona doesn't get us back in the game (with Intel), it puts us in a leadership position" (CEO Hector Ruiz, Sept. 10, 2007). The reality: the chip was announced in September but systems (as of March 6, 2008) have yet to appear from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell, or Sun.

Let's be perfectly frank: the hype surrounding Barcelona before it came out was nothing short of scandalous. Better, faster, more innovative. Let me paraphrase AMD's marketing: the Barcelona is a native quad-core design as opposed to Intel's kludgy chip that cobbles together two dual-core die. Barcelona has an on-die memory controller, Intel does not... I'll stop there. (If you want more, go to AMD's Web site.)

Advice for AMD: Hold the superlatives. First deliver in quantity the actual, viable physical chip that's supposed to do all these things better than the shipping Intel chip (shipping since October 2006). The adage "talk is cheap" has special meaning to journalists. And, I would imagine, special meaning to AMD's waiting customers.