SAN FRANCISCO--Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, already fighting over today's customers, held simultaneous meetings Wednesday to try to turn attention to the server processors that will be on tomorrow's battleground.
For AMD, the focus is on "Barcelona," the company's first quad-core Opteron processor due to ship later this year. For Intel, it's "Clovertown," a quad-core Xeon already on the market. AMD outgunned Intel with its Opteron processor launch in 2004, but Intel is back in the fray with its newest chips.
Intel plans two new Clovertown models at either end of the power consumption spectrum, said Tom Kilroy, a co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. Next week, Intel will release a model that consumes 50 watts maximum compared with today's 80-watt models. And for customers who want maximum performance but aren't as concerned about power consumption, the company will release a 3GHz model later this year, a notch faster than today's 2.66GHz parts, he said.
"Three gigahertz wasn't on our roadmap," he said, but the company is responding to customer requests for such a part.
AMD and Intel have been racing to squeeze as many processing engines called cores into a single processor or processor package as possible--an approach that works well for server jobs that often juggle numerous simultaneous tasks. But some customers also want each task to be completed as fast as possible. It's a balancing act, because adding more cores means chips consume more power and therefore typically must run at lower clock speeds.
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