So here we go again, the battle between Advance Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel resumed after AMD announced of their new launch of a 12 core server processor.  The announcement came two weeks after Intel launched their  hexacore (or would it be better to call it sexacore?) processor.

AMD claims that their new processor will beat Intel’s processor in terms of performance, energy efficiency and cost per computing power.  They claim that the new chip shows an increase of performance level up to 119% when compared to their older server chips using the same amount of energy.

Officially the chip will be named AMD Opteron 6000 series aiming for the high-end market and AMD Opteron 4000 series aimed for the low-end market.  AMD Maranello platform will be used to house the server chip.


AMD will also be introducing their Direct Connect Architecture 2.0 (DCA) which would allow a microprocessor to communicate with four other microprocessors simultaneously.  The DCA 2.0 would support up to 16 cores altogether.

With the introduction of the the new chip based on the code-named “Magny-Cours” design, consumers will have a chance of replacing aging servers with a single Magny-Cours server which provides better performance level, lower energy consumption and lower maintenance costs.

Next year the battle will continue and AMD is going to introduce their code-named “Interlagos” chips that will have 12 and 16 cores, and a low-end chip named “Valencia” with 6 to 8 cores.

My take on this is that it is good news.  I have always liked AMD instead of Intel and AMD are showing signs again that they are on a competitive level with Intel after their slack in recent years.  AMD chips are more energy efficient and their prices are much more lower than Intel’s prices but the performance power of AMD chips are always lagging behind Intel’s chips when compared to similar core processors.

Another reason for this being good news is that when new processors with more higher are released into the market, lower core processors prices drops even more.  As a consumer quad cores of processing power is more than enough to get through the day.  8 cores is useful if you are doing lots of video encoding or developing high-end 3D graphics but other than that it would be just silly to own an 8 core processor right now.

Not many softwares or games even utilizes the power of all the cores of the quad cores processor.  Imagine the 8, 12, 16 cores.  What would the those cores do?  By the time softwares are developed to utilize those cores maybe we will be having a processor that has 24 to 28 cores.  What normal human-being would use a processor with that much processing power?

In conclusion I support the chip wars because as a consumer we are the one winning and the chips are getting even more earth friendly.


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