Extremetech are reporting that the "Kentsfield" quad-core will be released 1 November with a shipping date of around 15 November.
As I've mentioned previously, the Kentsfield is more like a dual dual-core rather than a true quad-core implementation. The real quad-core goodness probably won't launch until first or second quarter next year.
AMD are expected to launch their 4x4 quadish-core solution around the same time, according to the same article.
Hot on the heels of my discovery of the OpenSparc initiative of Sun, I've come late to yet another open hardware party - AMD's Torrenza. Torrenza is a "socket compatibility" technology, where AMD has opened up the design for their Opteron sockets (the CPU technology they use for servers and other high-end uses) so that other "silicon designers" can design and build in a preexisting x86 environment with supported motherboards and chipsets that will already be in production, with resulting savings in economy of scale.
(x86, for anyone that isn't entirely familiar, is the basic processor architecture for just about all CPUs currently produced for consumers today. The x86 title stems from the early chips which would be most familiar to people as the old 286, 386 and 486 processors produced by Intel. The 86 nomenclature was eventually dropped in favour of names that could be trademarked (eg Pentium, Athlon) but as the basic architecture has remained the same, the x86 designation has remained to describe the family of processor technologies. While there have been a range of additions to the architecture such as AMDs x86-64 (among others) which changed the architecture from 32bit to 64bit, the basics are still the same, even with new multi-core processors)
While Torrenza was first announced back in June 2006, it's in the news again this week as AMD announced their plans for Torrenza with a range of partners including Sun, Cray, IBM and Dell. I'm still undecided as to whether this is a forward-thinking, strategic move from AMD to make sure that their motherboards become first choice through providing greater choice of processors, or if its a move of desperation as they battle to maintain market share in the server market.
Not being tapped into the scene in any shape or form, I guess I'm just going to have to wait and see.
Quad-core has a name, and that name is Barcelona.
Barcelona
AMD spoke to [Hard]Ocp about their upcoming multi-core solutions, in particular their latest quad-core technology, the Barcelona (can tell how much fun I'm having typing Barcelona? You should hear how I'm saying it - dodgy fake Spanish accents are a lot of fun - try saying Antonio Banderas in one and you will know what I mean).
Barcelona is due for release "mid-2007" and will be a "native" quad-core solution with four cores in the one chip as compared to Intel's Kentsfield "Quadro" which looks like it will be just two Core2 Duo dual processors crammed together on the one die, soaking up Watts and pumping out heat.
Who will use four cores?
Even with all these multi-cored beasties powering around, there's precious little software that has been designed to take advantage of the latest and greatest in chip design. Most software that can take advantage of a multi-core setup is used for things such as image manipulation, video rendering or audio tracking.
AMD have said that they are looking for games designed for consoles to lead the way, as the Xbox 360 has a triple-cored PowerPC (each core is dual-threaded so it can do 6 threads at once) and the PS3 will have the Cell chip with 7 of the 8 supporting processors activated (although one will be used for the PS3 operation system) and a controlling PowerPC core. As gaming houses get used to developing titles that support multi-threaded systems, they must be hoping that this skill set and knowledge will leak across to the PC market.
There will probably be benefits in decoding high-def TV on the fly and other media applications, and there will be potential for some parallel computing. It will be good when virtualisation software also begins to take advantage of the support being provided in the hardware which could allow for different operating systems to be run on individual cores. Aw yeah.
AMD and ATI
One of the key product developments that will come out of the AMD and ATI merger will be lower power, highly optimised CPU/GPU combinations on a single die for notebooks and lower-range desktops, possibly inside the next 18 months. There is a strong market for this sort of product in the corporate area, where desktop computers have no need for a separate graphics card, as well as the ability to pack more into a notebook/laptop chassis while taking up less space and at the very least, consuming no more power or creating no more heat than present technology and configurations.
There's also the growing markets for powerful but lower-speed x86 processors in set-top boxes, mobile communication devices (phones, Blackberries etc) and ultra mobile PCs (UMPC). ATI already has a large presence in the graphics processing side of these markets. AMD will now be in a position to develop units to compete with likes of ARM or Freescale, particularly as software for these smaller and more mobile devices becomes increasingly complex. I had an idea that this is the way they AMD and ATI might be heading, it's nice to see that confirmed by people who are actually in the know.
It would seem that AMD are still on track with their CPU production, which means that their long awaited "quad-core" chips won't be arriving until sometime in the 2nd Quarter of 2007, at least according to this Inquirer article (it is the Inquirer so have your industrial-sized salt shaker handy before ingestion)
Is this too little too late for AMD? With Intel pushing out their Kentsfield quad-core options now (probably by Q4/06, based on the Tom's Hardware preview I blogged about recently) and likely to have cooler and less power hungry versions by Q2/07, AMD look like they're going to have a tough battle on their hands if they want to keep taking market share from Intel.
With any luck these duelling cores will push existing dual-core solutions even further down in price, which can only increase the chances I will have of moving away from my sad little Sempron 2500+ into some cpu goodness.
And in the end, isn't that what technological advance is all about?
Edit: Forgot to include the story link. Idiot. All fixed now.
While it probably isn't news to anyone that cares, the merger between CPU maker AMD and graphics chipset maker ATI has been given final approval from competition regulators in the US (home of AMD), Canada (home of ATI) and Germany (where most of AMD's chip fabrication plants are located). As the pieces finish falling in to place, I'm still trying to work out the ramifications of the marriage between the two major market players. It's not an easy task for a faceless government administrator, so I can only build my knowledge based on what scraps of information leak into the public domain from industry insiders.
What is the merger going to do the market place? Prior to the formation of the mega-corp, the CPU and graphics markets were fairly even split: NVIDIA and ATI battled it out in the graphics and motherboard chipset market while Intel and AMD tussled for market share with CPUs. Intel was still market leader but AMD had been steadily eroding that advantage for some time, particularly in the enthusiast market where AMD was considered to have better bang for buck. Both NVIDIA and ATI made chipsets for motherboards that supported both Intel and AMD. In fact, most motherboards for the new AM2 were based on NVIDIA chipsets.
The AMD-ATI merger leaves a number of questions that I don't have the capacity to answer (and would love it if someone could point me towards someone who can) :
