AMD Hopes Quad-Core Server Chip Is Answer to Woes

Chipmaker will try to beat Intel with high performance instead of low prices.
Ben Ames, IDG News Service

Struggling to rebound from a $574 million loss in fourth-quarter earnings that it reported earlier this week, Advanced Micro Devices is pinning its hopes for recovery in 2007 to its planned "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip.

Since it launched in November, Intel's competing "Clovertown" quad-core Xeon chip has been adopted mainly for high-end research server platforms; Clovertown has been hobbled in part by a lack of multithreaded software capable of taking full advantage of the new chip technology. But AMD hopes to sell its Barcelona chip to users ranging from managers of high-performance computing centers to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs).
Revenue Increase Hopes

AMD expects a bounce in revenue when Barcelona launches the processor by the middle of 2007, since many customers have delayed buying new systems until the chip comes out. The company hopes that Barcelona will, at long last, enable AMD to break into the low-end server segment, which includes one-chip and two-chip computers and tower PCs, and rack-mounted servers.

"We're not yet in the SMB segment; it represents for us a great volume opportunity since we have so little market share now," said Kevin Knox, vice president of AMD's commercial business, on Wednesday.view site