AMD Plans to Ship Hundreds of Thousand Quad-Core Chips This Quarter

by Anton Shilov
10/18/2007 | 11:11 PM

Advanced Micro Devices was struggling to deliver its quad-core processors onto the market for many months, but when the world’s second largest maker of x86 central processing units (CPUs) finally managed to introduce its quad-core chips, it turned out that demand exceeds AMD’s supplies, the chipmaker admitted. Still, AMD hopes to improve its quad-core shipments sometime in November.

“While our initial production ramp of quad-core Opterons has been slower than anticipated, we expect quad-core Opteron will be widely available by the middle of this quarter; and, we expect to ship hundreds of thousands of quad-core processors this quarter into the server and desktop segments,” said Dirk Meyer, chief operating officer of AMD, during the company’s quarterly conference call with financial analysts.

AMD formally unveiled its quad-core server processors on September 10 and since then a number of observers noted that the new chips are not really widely available. In fact, it is not surprising, as the company shipped less than a hundred of thousand quad-core processors for mainstream servers during its third quarter that ends on the first of October, which means that revenue shipments of quad-core chips that started in mid-August were not really significant.

“We shipped tens of thousands of quad-core Opterons in Q3,” said Mr. Meyer.

Quad-core AMD Opteron processors code-named Barcelona are based on the company’s next-generation micro-architecture and are 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 is 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.