The company said yesterday that it had an HP Proliant DL585 powered by four dual core Opterons running at its corporate headquarters in Texas, in what it called the industry’s first demonstration of an x86 dual core processor.
The dual core processors demonstrated yesterday are pin compatible with the 940-pin socket designed for its 90 nanometer SOI designs.
Dual core processors for one to eight socket servers and workstations are due to ship in the middle of next year. Dual core client devices are expected to ship in the second half of 2005.
AMD has always said its AMD 64 architecture was designed to offer a rapid migration to dual core technology. According to a presentation on AMD’s website, each of the CPU cores has 1MB of cache, and share the same memory and HyperTransport interconnect resources.
Both AMD and its much bigger rival, Intel, are racing to get dual core technology onto the market. In May, Intel dropped a generation of chips from its roadmap and pulled forward the launch of dual core products in its desktop and server lines, with server products following a little later.
Intel’s later debut of dual core server technology likely has to do with the extensive validation processes it puts its chips through – it is increasingly trying to distinguish itself from AMD on this score.
At the same time, if AMD hits the server market ahead of Intel, it may be hoping to grain ground, at least in the lower-end of the server market, or in applications which demand large numbers of cheaper equipment.
