Date:14/11/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/11/14/stories/2008111457541800.htm

Business

AMD introduces power efficient 45nm quad chips

Anand Parthasarathy

— PHOTO: G. R. N. SOMASHEKAR

swappable features: Gautam Mukherjee, General Manager, OEM sales, AMD India, at the launch of 45nm quad core AMD opteron processor in Banglaore on Thursday.

BANGALORE: The world’s first ‘native’ quad-core processor realised with a 45-nanometer fabrication process saw its development anchored in Bangalore, with key parts of the central processor and the memory interfaces contributed by Indian engineers.

While AMD’s new 4-core Opteron chip for server applications was developed by its Sunnyvale (U.S.) and India-based team, the effort was led by the Bangalore end which supervised the effort from basic architecture to the final design that was passed on to silicon foundries, Karthik Muthuswamy, who heads the company’s India Design Centre, said here on Thursday.

Global launch

He was speaking at the launch of the new processor, simultaneous with its global availability.

The new Opteron family codenamed ‘Shanghai’ is an advance on AMD’s earlier quad — chip realised on 65 nanometer silicon, under the name ‘Barcelona’ —- and offers a 35-per cent decrease in its power consumption, when idle, and a similar figure of overall performance improvement, said Arvind Chandrasekar, AMD’s India-based General Manager for Business Development.

Four leading server-makers — HP, Dell, Sun and IBM — unveiled machines powered by the new processor at the launch event. Engineers also demonstrated its ‘hot swappable’ features: the chip can replace earlier version by simply replacing processors on the PC’s mother board. Its new design features also simplify the task of virtualization of server networks and migration of virtual machines to the new Opteron-fuelled platforms.