AMD Wins Another Round Against Intel

The FTC has subpoenaed the chipmakers to seek information about their customers, including Dell, HP, and Apple. At issue: Intel's pricingScore another victory for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in its crusade to sick regulators on bigger rival Intel (INTC). The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into chipmaker Intel and how its conduct affects AMD.



Intel and AMD said on June 6 that they had received subpoenas that give the FTC the leeway to seek information from the chipmakers' customers, including computer makers Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Toshiba, and Apple (AAPL).

The investigation is focused on Intel's dominance of the market for microprocessors, which make up the heart of a PC. In particular, the FTC wants more information on Intel's practice of offering favorable pricing on chips to certain customers.

The move follows a 2005 lawsuit filed by AMD (BusinessWeek.com, 6/28/05) that accuses Intel of engaging in an aggressive and global campaign to shut AMD out of the marketplace. AMD says Intel's main weapon of choice is the regular use of volume discounts that it claims Intel has sometimes rescinded when PC makers begin adding AMD chips to their product lineup.

That case is expected to come to trial in a Delaware court in early 2010.

Intel Cites Fierce Competition

Intel was already the subject of an informal FTC inquiry in September, 2007, and said it would cooperate with the commission's more formal investigation. In a statement, Intel described its business practices as "well within U.S. law," and said the microprocessor business is so "fiercely competitive" that prices on chips have fallen by more than 42% from 2000 to 2007.

Intel says AMD's problems in the marketplace have more to do with its ability to ship price-competitive products. "There are only two ways to look at this," says Intel Chief Counsel Bruce Sewell. "There is nothing in the record to suggest that Intel is pricing its products below cost. So if Intel is pricing above cost, then either AMD can meet those prices because it is equally efficient or it can't because it is less efficient."

That argument drew a sharp rebuke from Tom McCoy, AMD's executive vice-president for legal affairs. "This case isn't about discounts or even about pricing," McCoy says. "It's about market foreclosure. If it were only about pricing and discounts then Intel would be winning with the regulators around the world."

Korea Imposes $25 Million Fine on Intel


Indeed, some regulators haven't been too sympathetic to Intel. The Korea Fair Trade Commission ruled on June 5 that Intel had violated that country's antitrust laws by offering rebates to Korean PC makers Samsung and Trigem between 2002 and 2005 in exchange for their agreement not to use AMD chips. The commission imposed a $25 million fine and ordered Intel to stop offering the rebates. Intel has said it will likely appeal the decision. Antitrust regulators in Japan and the European Union also have come out against Intel, saying the company violated laws by paying PC makers not to use AMD chips.

Intel's defense may not hold much water with the FTC either, says David Balto, a former policy director for the FTC who's now an attorney in Washington. "These discounts are handcuffs dressed up as benefits, and they have prevented retailers and others from making choices they would have otherwise made in a free market," Balto says.

During 2005 and 2006, AMD won a good portion of business away from Intel in the server chip market (BusinessWeek.com, 3/6/06). It also landed its chips in computers from both Dell and Toshiba, both of which for many years had used only Intel chips (BusinessWeek.com, 5/30/07).

PC Vendors Not So Fearful of Intel
McCoy says at least some of those successes came in the wake of regulatory action. PC vendors are proving more willing to use AMD chips because they're less afraid of retaliation from Intel, he says. "There is an emerging consensus around the world that Intel is coercing customers to avoid doing business with us and that this is hurting consumer choice," McCoy says. More recently, AMD has floundered (BusinessWeek.com, 4/8/08).

This is not the first time Intel has tangled with the FTC. In the late 1990s, the FTC accused Intel of withholding key technical information about its chips from Digital Equipment Corp. and Compaq, (both now units of Hewlett-Packard) as well as Intergraph. The three all had key patents related to microprocessors for which Intel had sought licenses. When the companies tried to enforce their patents, Intel held back information the companies would need to build new computers as a means of coercing them to license the patents in question.

Intel settled in 1999 with only a day before trial was scheduled to begin. Settlement talks began after a tennis game between Intel attorney Michael Sohn and then FTC antitrust chief William Baer.

Since then, especially in the wake of the Justice Dept.'s case against Microsoft (MSFT), antitrust case law has been altered in such a way that the FTC is more likely to play hardball with Intel: "This time I think they're going to take a cold hard look at Intel's conduct," Balto says. "The first time antitrust law didn't recognize the potential anticompetitive harm from this kind of conduct and how it might be illegal."

Intel waiting for a hit product to get MID market rolling

Intel is counting on the emergence of a hit product to kick-start demand for mobile Internet devices (MID) and spur sales of its Centrino Atom chip platform.

"By the end of this year, you will have seen a whole bunch of new MIDs coming out and we'll see which ones are hits," said Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Sales and Marketing Group. "You only need one hit."

Centrino Atom is based on the Silverthorne version of the Atom processor and includes Intel's System Controller Hub, a single-chip chipset that functions as the device's central nervous system. The chips were designed to be used in handheld computers that can be used to access the Internet and play multimedia files.

So far, very few devices based on Centrino Atom have been announced and given a release date; the few devices that have been announced are priced far above the $500 target price that Intel set for these devices. The rarity of these devices means Centrino Atom shipments are also low.

The sluggish pace of the MID market stands in sharp contrast to low-cost laptops and desktops based on the Diamondville version of Atom, which uses a traditional two-chip chipset. At the Computex exhibition in Taipei last week, hardware makers were falling over themselves to showcase their latest laptops and desktops based on Atom -- and complaining they can't get enough of the chips from Intel.

There wasn't the same level of activity in the MID segment, although several prototype devices were on display. Despite that slower pace, Maloney said the MID category will get traction in the market eventually.

"As yet, we don't have any hit devices.The product's only just come out and there are a bunch of people announcing products, but the smaller a device gets the more it becomes a fashion item," Maloney said, alluding to the challenge hardware makers face when trying to gauge consumer tastes.

"It's very difficult for a CPU company to pick winners there. It's not really so much in our gene pool," he said.

Laptops and desktops based on Atom -- which Intel calls netbooks and nettops, respectively -- are a different matter. Hardware makers and Intel can draw on years of experience with these products, including the first version of Asustek Computers' Eee PC, to create devices that appeal to users.

"The netbook is more predictable, it's really like a notebook. With a MID, there's much more experimental design in it," Maloney said.

AMD Releases Four New Quad-Core Opterons

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday introduced its fastest quad-core server chips to date, two new 2-socket and two new 8-socket processors dubbed Opteron SE.
Following a highly publicized setback late last year in its initial ramp of quad-core processors caused by a silicon glitch, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD and OEM partners finally hit the market with B3-revision chips in March.

After splashy launch parties around the globe way back in September of last year, the ramp of the product codenamed Barcelona is finally proceeding apace with the introduction of two new 2.4GHz and two new 2.5GHz parts. The 2.4GHz quad-core Opteron 2358 SE is priced at $873 on AMD's Website, while the new top-of-the-line 2-socket released Monday by AMD, the 2.5GHz 2360 SE, has a price tag of $1,165.

Adding clock speed to its 8-socket quad-core portfolio are the new 2.4GHz 8358 SE, priced at $1,865, and the 2.5GHz 8360 SE, which runs a cool $2,149.

"In the 2-socket space, we're talking about the HPC folks, people doing genome-mapping for instance, where they need every last bit of clock speed and performance from each core," said AMD server chip manager Steve Demski last week.

"In the 8-socket space, the demographic is customers doing the really intense number-crunching against those big enterprise databases."

Demski said AMD expects Sun and Hewlett-Packard, who already offer 8-way servers built on previously released quad-core Opterons, to lead the way with new configurations featuring the 8358 SE and 8360 SE devices.

The new devices are benchmarking particularly well in terms of floating point performance, a traditional Opteron strength, Demski said, but the two new 8300 parts have also nailed the highest SAP-SD two-tier score in eight-socket servers and AMD is touting the 8358 SE and 8360 SE for data center scalability.

AMD also released three new Barcelona processors, codenamed Budapest, for single-socket servers earlier in June, bringing the chip maker's range of quad-core Opteron products a lot closer to the comprehensiveness anticipated last year, before the TLB errata was discovered in the original silicon.

The three single-socket chips that make up AMD's new Opteron 1300 series are all quad-cores, comprising the 2.1GHz Opteron 1352 ($209), the 2.2GHz 1354 ($255) and the 2.3GHz 1356 ($377).

IBM's Roadrunner Supercomputer Sets World-Record Speed

Beep beep! Sorry coyote, but you're still not wily enough to touch Roadrunner, IBM's supercomputer, billed as the fastest in the world operating at 1 petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
To be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, IBM built Roadrunner for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. The supercomputer, named after New Mexico's state bird, will also be used for astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change research.

So, exactly how fast is the supercomputer? IBM said the speed is roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today's fastest laptop computers—users would need a stack of laptops 1.5 miles high to match Roadrunner's performance. It would also take the entire population of the earth--about 6 billion people--each working a handheld calculator at the rate of 1 second per calculation more than 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day.

IBM said that in the past 10 years, supercomputer power has increased about 1,000 times. Today, just three of Roadrunner's 3,456 tri-blade units have the same power as the 1998 fastest computer. Now, a complex physics calculation that will take Roadrunner one week to complete would have taken the 1998 machine 20 years to finish.

IBM also said Roadrunner, the world's first hybrid supercomputer, uses a first-of-a-kind design, the Cell Broadband Engine. Originally designed for video game platforms such as the Sony Playstation 3, the engine will work in conjunction with AMD's x86 processors. Other companies that contributed components and technology include Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox and Voltaire.

In total, the computer connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips on IBM Model LS21 blade servers, in addition to 12,960 Cell engines on IBM Model QS22 blade servers.

Standard processing--such as file system I/O--is handled by the Opteron processors. Mathematical and CPU-intensive elements are directed to the cell processors.

The system has 80 terabytes of memory and is housed in 288 refrigerator-size IBM BladeCenter racks taking up 6,000 square feet. Roadrunner's 10,000 connections--both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet--require 57 miles of fiber-optic cable and weigh a whopping 500,000 pounds.

The supercomputer's custom configuration uses two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server that are combined into a specialized "tri-blade" configuration. Each tri-blade unit can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 Gigaflops). In total, Roadrunner has 3,456 tri-blades.

Roadrunner was built, tested and benchmarked in IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y., plant, which is also the home of the ASCI series of supercomputers the company built for the U.S. government in the late 1990s. IBM's site in Rochester, Minn., contributed to the project by constructing the specialized tri-blade servers. In addition, engineers developed the computers' software in IBM's Austin, Texas, and Yorktown Heights, N.Y., research labs. Roadrunner operates on open-source Linux software from Red Hat.

Despite its massive size, IBM calls Roadrunner an "energy miser." The Armonk, N.Y.-based company said that compared to most traditional supercomputer designs, Roadrunner's hybrid format sips power (3.9 megawatts) and delivers efficiency at 376 million calculations per watt.

As for future plans for Roadrunner, IBM is developing new software to make Cell-powered hybrid computing broadly accessible. Roadrunner's massive software effort targets commercial applications for hybrid supercomputing. Along with corporate and academic partners, IBM is developing an open-source ecosystem that is intended to bring hybrid supercomputing to financial services, energy exploration and medical imaging industries, among others.

Later this summer IBM will load the behemoth supercomputer onto 21 tractor trailer trucks to deliver it to the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico.

Quad core Opterons tip up - AMD debuts new server processors

Chip maker AMD has officially launched its new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE server processors. The new chips will be available in systems from the usual suspects including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and IBM.

The 2360 SE (2.5 GHz), 2358 SE (2.4 GHz), 8360 SE (2.5 GHz), and 8358 SE (2.4 GHz) are now shipping and have achieved the highest SAP-SD two-tier score in eight-socket x86 servers and the highest SPECfp_rate2006 scores in both two- and four-socket x86 servers, says AMD.

AMD’s Additions to its Opteron Portfolio

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has completed its quad-core Opteron portfolio, as it has started shipping two new processors for the 2300 series as well as two more for the 8300 series. The new chips are designed for high-end four-socket / eight-socket servers.

The newcomers are called Opteron 2358 SE (2.4GHz), Opteron 2360 SE (2.5GHz), Opteron 8358 SE (2.4GHz) and 8360 SE (2.5GHz); these are part of the company’s last set of 65-nanometer server models, as it plans to switch to a 45-nanometer assembly process later on this year. The upcoming chips may bring a speed increase of up to twenty percent.

In the second week of May, AMD launched five quad-core Opteron processors (8347 HE, 8346 HE, 2347 HE, 2346 HE, and 2344 HE), described by company officials as energy-efficient. They run on 55 Watts of AC power and, when compared to the 75-watt Barcelona chips that were released by AMD last year, the Opteron shows a 30 percent efficiency increase. The chips’ speeds, as well as their prices, range from 1.7GHz to 1.9GHz and from $209 to $873, respectively.

Also in May, the company presented its two-year server and workstation product plan. Next year, AMD’s first six-core chip is scheduled for release and for the first half of 2010, a 12-core processor is being prepared.

AMD releases quad-core Opterons for two-, four- and eight-socket systems

On Monday, June 9, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) introduced four new quad-core AMD Opteron SE processors for two-, four- and eight-socket commodity x86 systems. The new processors are comparable to larger, more costly symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) hardware.

"These Opteron offerings are for users who are most interested in maximum performance and are not concerned as much about wattage," said Steve Demski, AMD's Opteron product manager, "people who may have used high-end Unix systems and mainframes and want that kind of performance at a lower price point."

AMD also released quad-core processors for single-socket systems last week for applications that require a lot of data transfer and communication between processors.

In comparison, these quad-core processors designed for multiple-socket systems are best for applications that require a lot of memory or that perform more computing functions, rather than communications, according to Peter Ungaro, the CEO and president of Seattle-based Cray Inc., which uses various levels of AMD Opteron processors in its systems.

To be specific, workloads typically benefiting from four- and eight-socket server processing (the AMD 8000 series) include large databases, business processing systems (enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and supply chain management) and business intelligence, as well as other IT infrastructure applications including heavy-duty Web serving and messaging, according to AMD.

AMD Opteron 2000 Series processors for two-socket systems are used for Web, file and print servers, Java application servers, and some email servers. Clustered two-socket systems are also frequently used for applications in the life sciences and oil and gas industries, and in other engineering applications.

Quad-core Opterons for one-socket systems (i.e., the AMD 1000 series) are typically used for Web serving, file and print needs, and other less CPU-intensive applications. Cray's supercomputing systems are unique in their use of single sockets, an AMD spokesperson said.

The new quad-core AMD Opteron SE processors use registered memory and can support up to eight memory sticks per CPU. The chips are available from global OEMs and vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc., Dell Inc. and IBM.

The new quad-core AMD Opteron processor models and prices are as follows: 2358 SE (with 2.4 GHz) is $873; 2360 SE (with 2.5 GHz) is $1,165; 8358 SE (with 2.4 GHz) is $1, 865, and 8360 SE (with 2.5 GHz) $2,149. The processors are widely available.

In addition, the new processors have set some benchmarks. They achieved the highest SAP-SD two-tier score in eight-socket x86 servers, and quad-core AMD Opteron SE processors also achieved the highest SPECfp_rate2006 scores in both two- and four-socket x86 servers among comparable x86 processors.