AMD Ships Quad-Core Opteron Processors for Revenue – Company

by Anton Shilov
08/31/2007 | 11:54 AM

Advanced Micro Devices on Friday confirmed it had begun shipments of its highly-anticipated quad-core server microprocessors in August. The claim means that after all the delays and set-backs with the new micro-architecture and the world’s first monolithic quad-core x86 chip, the chipmaker is on track to formally release the chips in early September.

“AMD can confirm that Barcelona has been shipping for revenue in August,” said Phil Hughes, an AMD’s spokesperson for server and workstation products.

Mr. Hughes declined to comment on clock-speeds or other specifications of the shipping products and also remained tight-lipped regarding volumes or demand for the new central processing units that, according to AMD’s chief executive, faced six months delay. Revenue shipments of anticipated quad-core product may help AMD to improve its financial results for the third quarter, as novelties are usually sold at much higher margins than existing products.

AMD quad-core microprocessor die

Quad-core AMD Opteron processors code-named Barcelona are based on the company’s next-generation micro-architecture and will be produced using 65nm process technology. Among the highlights of AMD’s new chips the manufacturer lists shared 2MB L3 cache, 128-bit floating point units (FPU), SSE4A instructions, support for dual-channel DDR2 memory and other innovations.

The code-named Barcelona processor will be the first x86 chip that contains four processing engines on one piece of silicon. Currently available quad-core Intel Xeon chips integrate two dual-core chips on one piece of substrate, which gives the manufacturer some additional flexibility, but offers slightly reduced performance compared to monolithic design.

AMD is expected to host official introduction of its quad-core AMD Opteron processors on the 10^th of September. Initially AMD will offer quad-core microprocessors with reduced power consumption and clock-speed, but later in the year the chipmaker promised to release new versions of the quad-core Opteron with higher operating frequencies.