Chipmaker AMD likes taking potshots at big brother Intel. ‘An intelligent space expedition to Mars tomorrow may not help you battle the slowdown; nor can a virtual walkaway through the Taj tomorrow,” the firm’s media invite for its new six-core processor launch said – a refrence to Intel’s new campaign around “Sponsors of Tomorrow”.
It is too early to speculate on whether AMD’s “smarter” six-core Opteron server processor, code-named Istanbul, can help the firm claw back lost market share from Intel. However, argued the new processor, which launched Tuesday, can solve “today’s problems” and is the perfect slowdown product. Globally, Intel has about 89 per cent market share in the x86 server chip market while AMD holds the remaining 11 per cent.
Istanbul is a “catch-up processor” – Intel’s six core Dunnington processors released in September last year – but AMD promises more bang-per-buck because of lower cost of upgrades, better performance and power efficiency benchmarks. More number of chores or processors attached to an integrated circuit theoretically implies the ability to run multiple applications more efficiently, offering end-users – in this case enterprises – performance as well as productivity benefits over chips with lower cores. Istanbul is being offered in two-socket, four-socket, eight-socket configurations and claims 34 per cent more performance per watt than the quad-core Shanghai processor.