Filed under: Desktops

Let’s not beat around the bush: AMD’s oft-delayed Barcelona quad-core processor was a flop. It arrived late and buggy, an undesirable reception that helped to drive the company’s $1.2 billion Q2 loss this year. AMD can’t afford another flub like that and is hoping that processor’s successor, Shanghai, finds more success in the server market. It’s a 45nm quad-core chip with three times the cache (6MB) and HyperTransport 3, apparently equating to a 20 percent boost in speed and even thriftier power consumption. AMD is saying the chip is already under production and will be available for sale before the year is out, actually beating expectations for once. That should be shortly followed by the release of 45nm Deneb processors for desktops, then six-core Istanbul chips sometime late 2009. Meanwhile, Intel’s six-core, 45nm server chips are now shipping.

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Filed under: Desktops

If your interest in processor speeds doesn’t extend much beyond “is it fast?” then these juicy tidbits likely aren’t for you. That said, AMD is certainly getting excited about its upcoming Barcelona sucessor: the 45nm Shanghai. The main points of interest out of the gate are HyperTransport 3.0, which was nixed late in the game on Barcelona, and six cores, which are meant to pit the chip up against Intel’s upcoming six-core Dunnington chip. Where things get really exciting is a few months after Shanghai’s late 2008 debut, when AMD plans do release a twin-die version, with 12 cores of happiness connected by HyperTransport 3.0. What does all that mean? Beats us, but we hope it’s fast.

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Filed under: Laptops

We already knew that Intel and OLPC had officially shook hands and agreed to work with one another in some elusive fashion, and now things are becoming a touch clearer. Reportedly, the chip maker will be designing a “new architecture specifically for the ultra-low cost laptop category,” and if all goes as planned, it’ll unveil the OLPC-ready CPU at next year’s Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai. Apparently, Intel even looked into modifying current mobile chips rather than starting from scratch, but according to Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of the mobile platforms group at Intel, the “small size, low cost and low power consumption required by the OLPC laptop made it unique enough to require a new architecture.” The new microprocessors should be uncovered on April 2-3, 2008.

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