SAN FRANCISCO(Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices has started selling the newgeneration of its Opteron quad core processors for servers, AMDannounced on Wednesday, nearly one year after Intel launched its own 45nanometer chip.
After a troubled launch of its earlier Barcelona chip, AMD waiteduntil the new chip, called "Shanghai," was actually in distribution tomake its formal announcement.
The chip is called quad core because each core operates as anindependent computing device on the same chip. The size historicallyrefers to the smallest feature on a chip.
The Shanghai chip has high energy efficiency, AMD says. For example,it automatically turns off some parts of the chip when they are not inuse, even for short periods of time, the company said.
The Shanghai is designed to work well with so-called virtualization,in which space is saved on servers by running separate "virtual"machines across drives, instead of requiring separate drives for eachmachine.
AMD said that two versions of the chip are available now, with enhanced versions available in early January.
IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Dell are among 25 systemsvendors who will be shipping machines this quarter with the new chip onboard, AMD said.
AMD quoted a Hewlett-Packard executive in praise of the new chip.Paul Gottsegen, vice president of marketing for Industry StandardService, said HP had "experienced unparalleled success over the pastfour years working with AMD in bringing AMD Opteron processor-basedplatforms to customers."
The company said that the processors are easier to replace than Intel’s. Intel says that is not true.
AMD said it is looking to increase market share with the server. Themarket intelligence firm iSuppli said it had only 12 percent in thethird quarter.
(Reporting by David Lawksy, additional reporting by Georgina Prodhan in London; Editing by Gary Hill)
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