Aiming to deflate archrival Intel, Advanced Micro Devices this week will show off its dual-core chips, which will start to trickle out toward the middle of next year.

AMD on Tuesday will show off a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant server with four dual-core Opteron chips at a facility in Austin, Texas, bringing the functional number of chips in four-processor servers to eight.

"When you load Microsoft (Server 2003), it shows up as eight processors," said Marty Seyer, vice president and general manager of the microprocessor business unit at AMD.

The chip "taped out"--semiconductor shop talk meaning that the design was completed--in June, and AMD recently produced the samples that will be displayed in Austin, Seyer added.

News Hardware 

For Intel, the future has two cores
By Ina Fried and Stephen Shankland
CNET News.com
September 7, 2004, 12:20 PM PT
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SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is trying to make the case that a collection of chips is worth more than the sum of its parts.

The chipmaker presented its argument in several ways on Tuesday. For one, Intel said it has seen a benefit in marketing several chips together, as it has done with Centrino, its bundle of technology for wireless notebook PCs.

Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum here, Intel President Paul Otellini said the next target for such a bundle will be the home PC, which is being transformed from a productivity machine into a home entertainment center that demands both speed and new features, such as content protection.


Intel also believes that its future lies in dual-core chips, a single piece of silicon with two multiprocessor cores. The company scrapped plans for a faster traditional Pentium 4 in favor of the "two is better than one" approach.

In 2005, Intel will relaase dual-core chips for servers, desktops and laptops, Otellini said. By 2006, the company expects about half of its chips to have such a design, with all future products being designed around multiple cores. As expected, Otellini discussed some of Intel's dual-core plans during his presentation.

As chipmakers plunge into the world of multicore processors to increase performance, software companies are struggling to catch up.

The prevailing method of selling server software--based of the number of processors, or basic computing brains, that a computer has--is being made obsolete by changes in processor designs and server capabilities.

Chipmakers can now etch two-processor cores on to a single slice of silicon--and these dual-core processors are about to become mainstream. The new chips are far more powerful than current models and can efficiently handle multiple tasks. But whether a dual-core chip should count as one, two or more processors when tallying software licensing charges is the crux of the issue. Other new chip technologies could further blur the lines.

Many software products, such as e-mail servers or databases, are often priced based on the number of server processors. With dual-core processors now on the market, software companies--and their customers--need to reconsider that model.

Some software makers charge customers as though a server with a dual-core processor were a two-processor machine, effectively doubling the cost of programs priced on a per-processor basis. Other industry players are urging software companies to treat multicore processors as a single unit, even though it could cut into software companies' revenues, if customers can make do with fewer instances of their programs.