Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will unveil its new microprocessor, code-named Barcelona, which provides calculating engines for the midsize machines that run Web sites and other key business programs, media reported Monday.
Barcelona, to be formally called the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor, is seen as important not only for an AMD turnaround, but also for server makers who want to play chip vendors off each other to get lower prices and higher performance.
"Choice is a wonderful thing," says Mark Barrenechea, president and chief executive of Rackable Systems Inc., a Fremont, Calif., company in U.S. that plans to use chips from both companies. "A stronger AMD is a stronger Rackable."
Still, Barcelona already has customers. Server makers expected to add Barcelona-based models -- and participate in Monday's launch event in San Francisco -- include International Business Machines Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center, affiliated with the University of Texas in Austin, plans to install a massive cluster of 3,936 Sun servers -- each with four Barcelona chips, giving the supercomputer 62,976 processors in all, said Tommy Minyard, assistant director of the center.
Barcelona has a series of power-saving features and uses an older, more power-efficient style of memory chips than Intel's Xeon.
"AMD, I would say, is greener than Intel, and that benefits us," said Nicolas Keller, director of platform products at Rackspace Managed Hosting. The San Antonio company runs servers for other companies and plans to give customers a choice of Barcelona-based machines as well as Intel-based servers.
Source: Xinhua/agencies
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