Los Angeles - Chip manufacturer AMD aims to challenge rival
Intel by launching its Shanghai processor by the end of the year.
The company has learned its lesson and there won't be any of the
start-up problems of the kind that afflicted the company's latest
Barcelona processor, AMD manager Pat Patla told the CNET media
company.
AMD, the world's second biggest chipmaker after Intel, lately
suffered billion dollar losses and replaced its top management.
Barcelona was aimed at finally catching up with main rival Intel
in the server market, but after numerous technical problems it was
launched eight months behind schedule.
'Originally the plan was that Shanghai would launch in the first
quarter 2009 and we were able to pull that into the fourth quarter of
this year,' Patla said.
Quad-core chip Shanghai is designed for use on servers. A PC
version called Deneb is scheduled for the first quarter of
2009.
'We're in full production right now in the factory,' Patla said,
adding that 'people will start getting first silicon from the final
production very shortly.'
According to the CNET report, Shanghai will out-perform its
predecessor Barcelona by 20 per cent. It is the first AMD product
manufactured in 45-nanometer technology, which Intel has already been
using for some time. This allows more items to be produced in
one production run.
The competition in the lucrative server market will remain tight.
Only two weeks ago, Intel presented its Xeon 7400, a server processor
with six cores, which is soon to be delivered to clients like Dell,
HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems.
The more cores that can be fitted onto a piece of silicon, the
more calculations a computer is theoretically able to process
simultaneously.
According to AMD's Patla, the company is planning its first six-
core chip for the fourth quarter next year.
USA
Your Talkback on this Story