CHIP FIRM AMD is telling investors who ask that it has started shipping 90 nanometre Athlon 64 microprocessors.
Although it hasn't said which vendors have started shipping the chips, it said a few vendors are using the process shrink in their machines.
More are to follow soon, the company said.
AMD on Tuesday will show off a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant server with four dual-core Opteron chips at a facility in Austen, 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.
Advanced Micro Devices announced it had begun production of chips using 90nm Silicon-on-Insulator process technology at its Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany. Despite of some information available from unofficial sources, AMD promises to deliver commercial products using this fabrication process next quarter.
OUR READERS WILL recall that AMD was one of the first to jump in bed with the Trusted Computing "Palladium" initiative when that kicked off some years ago.
And this morning we had the chance to talk to Geoffrey Strongin, AMD's platform security architect, who gave us some interesting information on what will happen in the future.
As a preamble, Strongin pointed out that AMD has not yet decided when to bring its Opteron security features to market, and as these are unannounced products, he wouldn't talk products, as you'd expect.
US DISTRIBUTORS tell us to expect a round of fresh price cuts on Opteron processors and the like in early May.
Although we have no details of such pricing quite yet, we're wondering if the cuts will coincide with some 90 nanometre little Opterons, fresh from the IBM foundry.
What IBM foundry deal, we hear you asking? Because neither AMD nor IBM have yet formally announced that such a thing will happen in the future.
AMD got the attention of Microsoft with their 64-bit Athlon 64/Opteron platform, and it was enough attention to warrant a new OS port to x86-64. Just weeks ago AMD scored another victory, with Intel announcing the adoption of AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.
Advanced Micro Devices is promoting computer security through processor design.
The chipmaker on Wednesday announced that it has included a feature inside its Athlon 64 and Opteron processors for PCs and servers that will help combat certain computer viruses and worms. The feature, which will work in concert with Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, will be switched on later this year when Microsoft releases its Service Pack 2 update for the OS.
Germany and the state of Saxony will give Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) approximately €545 million ($683 million) in grants and allowances toward the construction of its new manufacturing plant in Dresden after the European Commission approved the aid package, AMD said Friday. The new plant, to be called AMD Fab 36, will be the company's first 300-millimeter facility when volume production commences in 2006 alongside AMD's existing 200 millimeter Dresden facility, said Drew Prairie, an AMD spokesman.
AMD's upcoming Athlon FX-53 processor has surfaced on the web. Apparently.
GZeasy has a rather blurry, indistinct photo of a chip, which it claims is the 2.4GHz processor. To back-up its claim, the site has posted a series of BIOS and CPU information software screen shots mentioning the Athlon FX-53 by name.
Given how easy it is to fake up these things, we'll leave final judgement on the pics' veracity to you good selves.
WE REPORTED LAST week that an Athlon 64 Systemax PC had been TigerDirect's third best selling desktop, and the top selling AMD based desktop. Even though one of those models peaked at number two, another is currently hovering in eighth position. This would suggest that TigerDirect's astute US customers are now waiting for the better value Athlon 64 3000+ desktops to arrive, which will deliver comparable performance at around a $200 saving.
