Guild Companies

It was a busy time last week for Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Both companies rolled out two new 64-bit processors aimed at the workstation and server markets, to help them better compete against others in the chip market in general and against each other in the X86 market in particular. Both companies are trying to get market momentum behind their respective Itanium and Opteron lines.

The Itanium 2 and Opteron processors have won accolades for many of their technical features and have earned the scorn of some snobby rivals in the RISC/Unix chip business, but the one thing they haven't won so far is a lot of business. But, with each improvement in the Itanium 2 and Opteron lines, Intel and AMD are getting products out the door that are more appealing to commercial customers.

This is particularly true with the new "Deerfield" Itanium 2 processors, which are a trimmed-down version of the "Madison" Itanium 2 chip, which Intel launched at the end of June. (See the July 9 issue of this newsletter for full details on the Madison announcement.)

The Madison chip has an improved core design over the first-generation "Merced" Itanium processors, which were late, delivered less performance than many expected, ran very hot, and were therefore not enthusiastically supported by the server and workstation makers of the world. The Madison chip fixed some of these problems, in that it had a very large cache, ran somewhat cooler, and delivered the kind of performance that compared nicely with RISC/Unix alternatives. Intel has three versions of the Madison chip, each with a different price and performance point. The entry Madison chip runs at 1.3 GHz and has 3 MB of L3 cache. It will sell for $1,338 in 1,000 unit quantities. The middle chip is slightly faster, at 1.4 GHz, and has slightly more L3 cache, at 4 MB; it costs $2,247 per 1,000. The fastest Madison chip runs at 1.5 GHz, has 6 MB of L3 cache, and costs $4,426 per 1,000.

The Deerfield variant of the Itanium 2 was designed for denser machines and working conditions where electricity usage and heat dissipation are issues. The Deerfield chip is technically known as the Low Voltage Itanium 2. It runs at 1 GHz and includes only 1.5 MB of integrated L3 cache memory. Like all Itanium 2 chips, it has 32 KB of L1 cache and 256 KB of L2 cache on-chip. The smaller L3 cache and lower clock speed allows the Deerfield chip to top out at 62 watts of power consumption when it is running all-out, which is about half the power of a Madison chip running at 1.5 GHz and with 6 MB of L3 cache. On a lot of workloads, the Deerfield will consume half the watts for two-thirds of the performance--a tradeoff that many customers have asked Intel for. Perhaps more significant, the Deerfield chip only costs $744 in 1,000-unit quantities, which means it delivers four times the bang for the buck over the Madison chip on workloads that do not need that big L3 cache. Uniprocessor workstations and two-way servers are going to be the sweet spot for Deerfield, which stands to reason considering this is its design point.

Just before the Madison launch, we reported in this newsletter that Intel was working on a variant of the Madison processor aimed specifically at high-performance computers used for number-crunching jobs. The high cost and the high heat of the Madison were making it hard for Itanium to gain traction in the high-performance-computing market. (Hewlett-Packard, pitching Itanium, lost the 100 teraflops Red Storm deal to an AMD Opteron cluster proposed by Cray, and it has also lost some big deals to rival IBM, which pushes its Power4 and Power5 RISC/Unix chips.) To make Itanium more attractive to high-performance-computing customers, Intel last week debuted a new Madison chip running at 1.4 GHz and having only 1.5 MB of L3 cache on chip. This new Madison processor has the same 400 MHz, 128-bit system bus as all the other Itanium 2 processors (including the Deerfield), and supports 6.4 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. On computationally intensive workloads, such as those simulating hurricanes as they move toward the East Coast, the new high-performance-computing variant of Madison will deliver about 90 percent of the performance of the biggest, baddest 1.5 GHz Madison, but because the cache is 25 percent the size, it will consume a lot less power. At $1,172 in 1,000-unit quantities, it delivers a factor 3.5 improvement in price/performance compared with the top-end Madison processors.

AMD is continuing to flesh out its 64-bit "SledgeHammer" Opteron processors, which can support 32-bit and 64-bit modes at the same time. (The Itanium processors run a new 64-bit instruction set that is unique from the X86 instruction set used in the 32-bit Pentium family. The Itaniums do have an X86 emulation mode, but it does not offer very good performance. Intel is working on that.) Back in April, AMD debuted the Opteron in three different versions: one for uniprocessor machines (the 100 series), one for two-way servers (the 200 series), and one for four-way or eight-way servers (the 800 series). The initial Opterons ran at 1.4 GHz, 1.6 GHz, and 1.8 GHz; they include 128 KB of L2 cache and 1 MB of on-chip L2 cache. The Opteron design also includes an on-chip DDR-SDRAM memory controller--an industry first and the source of many performance benefits. This allows the memory controller to run at the same core frequency as the Opteron processor. (Off-chip memory controllers typically run at half the speed or slower.) And with each chip having its own memory controller, memory bandwidth scales as Opterons are added to a processor complex. Each processor can have eight DIMMS, and that means 8 GB of main memory per processor using today's DRR-SDRAM technology. That gives an eight-way Opteron box 64 GB of main memory and 5.3 GB/sec of memory bandwidth to play with.

Last week, AMD rolled out the Opteron 146, a 2 GHz chip for uniprocessor machines, which it is selling for $669 apiece in 1,000-unit quantities. AMD also has rolled out a 2 GHz Opteron 246, which it will sell for $3,199. This pricing delivers performance akin to Intel's 32-bit Pentium 4 Xeon processors plus 64-bit support (like Itaniums have) at prices that are absolutely competitive with Xeons.

While IBM has come forward and is supporting the AMD 246 processors in its eServer 325 line, no big server vendor has stepped forward and said that it would deliver a full set of workstation and server products that use the AMD Opterons as their main processors. If AMD wants to compete against Intel's Itanium, it is going to have to rally more support. None of the major server vendors has a vested interest in undermining their own RISC/Unix lines, and HP, which has put all of its server eggs in the Itanium basket, wants nothing to do with Opteron. This is a quandary for AMD, which has designed a great processor that no one will use except in precise and limited markets--at least for now.