Advanced Micro Devices Inc. put a quad-core server processor on its road map and promised to upgrade its software investments, as it outlined on Tuesday its general technology direction for the next couple of years. AMD will introduce a new core design in 2007 that is similar to the core used by the company's Opteron and Athlon 64 processors, said Phil Hester, vice president and chief technology officer at AMD, one of several executives who took the stage at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California during its analyst day.
The new processor will incorporate four cores connected together by a new version of the Hypertransport interconnect technology, and will support DDR3 (double data rate 3) memory, he said at the event, which provides financial analysts and media with a "State of AMD" address that covers the company's technology, customers, and financial health. The server version of this chip will add a third level of cache memory to AMD's processors, allowing server designers to build systems with 16 and 32 processors, Hester said. Previously AMD's customers had been limited to building eight-processor Opteron servers because of the difficulty inherent in coordinating cache memory requests within multiprocessor servers.
News source: InfoWorld
