AMD reveals server product line-up

Manager reveals latest plans for server market

AMD’s server and workstation product manager Christophe Dobroschke has set out a roadmap for AMD’s server products.

Dobroschke denied AMD has any sort of credibility problem and that it needed to restore confidence in its server products, after a number of delays in its product rollout.

The delays in launching the Barcelona chipset led one critic to call for it to be renamed, ‘La Sagrada Familia of Gaudi’ after Barcelona’s Gaudi cathedral, which was never completed.

“We have a lot of strategic OEMs that are keen to build servers on our Barcelona chipset,” said Dobroschke. “IBM and Sun both have a tight relationship with us. HP and Dell have already announced virtualisation platforms. There is a lot of goodwill in the industry in terms of our ability to provide an alternative to Intel.”

Not everyone shares this optimism. Nathaniel Martinez of research group IDC’s enterprise server solutions programme, said: “Historically AMD has had difficulty with delivering on the quad-core processing. The glitches it suffered have tested people’s patience.”

Though AMD still has a strong hold in the four-way server market ­ the market for servers that host four CPUs ­ it will need to start producing the goods fast.

If the name of the game is getting more processing power per namometre of silicon, Martinez warned, it looks like Intel could be about to neutralise any advantage AMD has. Though AMD boasts that its upcoming Shanghai project will offer 45 nanometre processors in 2009, Intel already has a product available.

“Intel is already shipping and it offers excellent margins,” said Martinez. “Because it is the only product of its kind, at the moment, it can charge a premium for it.”

AMD’s response, a six-core processor code named Sao Paolo, is due out in 2010. Dobroschke said clockspeed is not the only way to fine-tune a better server engine.

“Efficiency is what vendors look for now,” he argued.