Next year AMD will enter the market of CPUs destined for use in servers and high-end workstations. It is a giant leap for AMD, who was not able to present a proper processor even for mainstream computers just about five years ago, but managed to launch a very successful and competitive Athlon CPU in 1999 that is basically still on the track. That is why the industry observers now wait for AMD’s server microprocessors launch in the first quarter next year, as it may appear that AMD will be quite lucky on this market as well.

One should keep in mind that initial success of AMD’s Athlon processors was conditioned by the fact that they were the fastest chips in 1999. Being not able to offer the same kind of performance, the rival used to launch the “paper” Pentium III CPUs, just like AMD does it these days. Now that Intel has its Pentium 4, the situation is a bit different. Although these processors can work at much higher core-clocks compared to AMD’s chips, the latter still offer comparable speed. On the other hand the gap between the actual frequency of AMD’s and Intel’s CPU constantly widens and will soon achieve astonishing 1GHz. Moreover, Intel will launch processors with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus and the Hyper-Threading technology support next year and will lead both in terms of core-clocks as well as actual performance on the desktop computers market. But what about servers? The company is not very likely to introduce faster FSBs or do something like that on this market since there are a lot of platforms that meet the present 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus requirements and it will not be easy to certify a broad family of new platforms even in case they decide to go with faster system bus. Therefore, next year AMD and Intel will compete on the field of servers with core-clock, actual performance and the ability to offer various solutions based on their microprocessors for different kinds of businesses. Intel has a big advantage in the last case since AMD at the moment has very few partners that will offer Opteron based servers, whereas there are bunch of those, who will continue to sell the Xeon-based servers next year.

As we already know, AMD will present three different versions of their Opteron processors, the SledgeHammer III, the SledgeHammer DP and the SledgeHammer MP with 1MB of L2 cache for 1-way, 2-way and 4/8-way systems respectively. They all do not seem to have any architecture differences, even despite of the fact that they are intended for totally different market segments.

Intel will offer two kinds of their Xeon processors: the Xeon (let us call it Xeon DP) for 2-way systems and the Xeon MP for multi-processor systems.

Let us take a look at the table that represents the CPUs that will be available next year according to the current roadmaps.

Server Processors from Intel and AMD in 2003
CPU	2003				2004
	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
AMD Opteron Processors	1.40GHz 1.60GHz	1.80GHz 2.0GHz	2.20GHz	2.40GHz 2.60GHz	>	>	*	n/d
Intel Xeon MP Processors	2.0GHz/2MB 1.90GHz/1MB 1.50GHz/1MB	n/d	2.50GHz	n/d	**		n/d	n/d
Intel Xeon DP Processors	3.06GHz/533MHz 3.0GHz/400MHz 2.80GHz/533MHz 2.80GHz/400MHz 2.66GHz/533MHz 2.60GHz/400MHz 2.40GHz/400MHz	>	>	*** 3.40GHz/1MB	n/d	n/d	n/d	n/d

"n/d" - no details;
">" - no announcements expected;
* - Athens family of x86-64 CPUs announcements;
** - Xeon MP's core shrink to 90 nanometer technology;
*** - Nocona processor's launch;
Processors written in italics are the ones that are already available.

As we see, AMD will be pretty hard to compete with Intel in terms of core-clocks, even with the Xeon MP CPUs that incorporate large L3 cache. On the other hand, we should not forget about AMD’s architectural efficiency compared to Athlon XP processors, so, I believe that the Opteron chips will be able to offer comparable performance to the Xeon MP chips in 2003. Remember that Intel launches the Xeon MP processors made using 90nm (90 nanometer) technology in the first half of 2004, hence, they should be able to pump the frequencies up then.

As for the workstation segment, where the Xeon DP processors are used, it is pretty hard to predict whether the Opteron chips will be able to beat the competitors in workstation applications or not in the early 2003 (it is not very likely, considering the 1.6GHz core-clock difference in Intel’s favour, though, is possible). By the end of the year Intel will unveil its Nocona chips with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, 1MB of L2 cache, probably the Hyper-Threading II technology enabled and also 1GHz ahead of AMD’s most powerful Opteron. Since AMD is not going to roll-out faster x86-64 chips for servers and workstations until the third quarter 2004, Intel will rule the workstation world in the first half of 2004, at least, in terms of performance.

Now we should wait for the real benchmarks as well as availability of AMD Opteron-based servers to make our conclusion about the chances of the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU developer on the field of servers and high-end workstations.