Q&A: AMD coming back swinging on the quad-core front, exec says

Computerworld - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has recently seen rival Intel Corp. win a couple of rounds. Not only does Intel's quad-core processor have at least a six-month jump on its own, but longtime partner Sun Microsystems Inc. recently announced that it will be selling quad-core servers based on chips from both companies.

Still, AMD is pushing on. In the fourth quarter of 2006, AMD for the first time ever garnered more than one-fourth of the total x86 processor market, according to Mercury Research. AMD just today released some of the first technical details of its upcoming Barcelona processor, the company’s first quad-core offering for the server and workstation market.

Also new: a half-dozen or more partners with application-specific co-processors that AMD promises will yield significantly higher performance levels than possible before, thanks to a direct link with Opteron as part of the Torrenza platform. And just this week, AMD introduced new versions of its Geode chips, to power thin-client PCs and other smaller platforms.

Marty Seyer, AMD’s senior vice president of commercial business, recently talked about where he believes AMD is situated with corporate customers.

Is there a feeling within AMD that the company is at an important tipping point in its acceptance by corporate decision-makers? As recently as 2003, when we were knocking on the door of the enterprise, candidly, we were not qualified. The momentum kicked in the middle of 2006 with the full adoption of Opteron by all the tier-one [resellers] -- Dell, HP, IBM and Sun. Customers tell us they no longer perceive us as some “Johnny Come Lately,” or second-class player. They telling us we’re a technology leader now, and they expect us to lead.

Initial reports about systems based on Intel’s quad-core Xeon processors have been favorable. Doesn’t AMD have a huge challenge over the next six months to demonstrate it’ll be able to bridge the quad-core gap with Barcelona and regain a clear performance advantage? First of all, our competition made no fundamental changes to their architecture for their quad-core product. They tweaked it and beat us to market with quad-core. We believe we will provide a fundamentally better-balanced architecture. Right now, there is a lot more noise associated with quad-core than actual implementation. We believe when we ship in mid-2007, we’ll be right in the thick of it ... I don’t think we’ve lost momentum.

Last month, Sun Microsystems, which had been offering only AMD-based x86 servers, announced it will begin offering quad-core servers based on Intel’s Xeon processors. If AMD already had its quad-core in place, perhaps Sun wouldn't have made that decision. As