The battle for server market share is on, with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announcing the much-awaited Opteron 6000 series chips for data centers.
Although Intel Corp (INTC) and AMD have continued to battle for supremacy in speed and performance over the last few years with successive launches of their dual core, triple core (from AMD) and quad core microprocessors, AMD’s new chip tops the list so far.
The new chips are based on a design called the Magny-Cours and come with eight and 12 cores, meaning that they are the fastest chips in the world. Intel’s new Xeon 5600 chips announced a couple of weeks ago have six cores.
A core is the logic block that may be referred to as a processing unit. Therefore, the larger the number of cores, the greater the speed and efficiency. Additionally, since each core can take up a different task, the pressure on an individual core is less; therefore heat dissipation is reduced. Another advantage that would not be lost on IT managers is the energy savings to be gained.
AMD has announced that several hardware OEMs, such as Hewlett Packard Company (HPQ), Dell Inc. (DELL) Acer Group, Cray Inc. (CRAY) and SGI, are already developing systems based on its new chips.
Intel’s Xeon 5600 processors will be similar in performance to its earlier-generation Nehalem chips, so Intel’s play here is with respect to the reduction in power usage. The company claims the chips will consume 30% less power than the Nehalem chips (which were extremely successful).
AMD however has adopted an aggressive pricing strategy, which is expected to be furthered through its partnership with Acer.
AMD shares are up 1% since the market opened this morning, significantly better than the S&P 500. Intel shares also advanced, but at a lower rate.
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