Computing world is entering into a faster lane. A quantum leap is around the corner for high-end servers and is expected to trickle down to desktops and notebooks soon. The big promise comes from the just-announced new lines of quad-core computer chips that come with four cores to distribute computing tasks, instead of one single central core or brain.
More computing arsenal is expected later this year with a new chip-making technology, which will shrink the size of the circuitry to 45 nanometers or 45 billionth of a metre to offer more computing power at lower prices and with lower power consumption.
And the action is not limited to processing power. Chip turf is readying for a tug-of-war between microprocessor giants?Intel and AMD. Both are racing to release offerings pitted against each other. AMD is pegging its next-generation microchip as the ?world?s most advanced x86 processor ever designed and manufactured?; while Intel insists they were the first to market quad-core chips nine months back. A showdown seems imminent after a year-long lull.
Drama has already begun, with claims and counter-claims doing the rounds. ?Ours is the first native quad-core. Barcelona has four individual cores wired separately and not two dual-core processors slapped onto a single die,? says AMD India managing director, Alok Ohrie. ?A seven seater car is a seven seater car. Does it matter to you how it was built?whether it is 3+4 seats or 5+2 seats?? counters Intel South Asia director (sales), R Ravichandran. He is quick to add that Intel?s quad-core was the first to hit the market.
Clearly, quad-core will be hot in near future. And as both go on the offensive, prices of quad-core chips are sure to roll down. Insiders are expecting aggressive price cuts. ?The risk is high that Intel reacts to AMD?s increased competitiveness with aggressive price cuts,? warned a Morgan Stanley research note. ?Competition will surely see a price dip. You could expect to see volumes grow in next three to four months and quad-core prices could catch up with that of dual-cores in about six months,? agrees Arnab Roy, general manager, marketing, Sun Microsystems India.
Both sides tout their supremacy. AMD seems more confident than ever, with over 50 quad-core ready platforms available from leading OEMs, believed to be key to the battle for market dominance.
AMD insiders get into the intricate details of circuitry to establish their technical leadership. AMD?s design is a native quad-core. This means that AMD has build four identical cores onto a single piece of silicon while Intel puts two dual-core designs on a chip and connects them to form a quad-core. Intel, however, claims they were the first to market and their design has been tried and tested in the market in last nine months. AMD also takes pride in its on-chip memory controller, which is claimed to be faster than having the controller in a separate chip set as Intel does. Intel executives are quick to point out that analysts were underwhelmed by the high-profile AMD launch. ?Launch was delayed by six months and chips available at launch were slower than expected,? they quip.
Nevertheless, both the companies are proud of their achievements. ?Intel scores higher on integer-based applications. AMD, however, has a better bus architecture and does exceedingly well in floating point applications,? suggests Arnab Roy of Sun, which has both Intel and AMD as well as its own 8-core RISC processors.
High-performance computing users are expected to be the first ones to take the plunge. Early adopters of Intel?s quad-core chips, which have shipped over a million units globally, include L&T, Bajaj Alliance and United Breweries. ?Enterprises are ready, with most applications already threaded. On desktops, animation and gaming are multi-threaded,? says R Ravichandran. Analysts expect telecom, financial services and professional services like IT and BPO firms to be the first few to need four-core computing. IDC India computing product research manager, Piyush Pushkal agrees. ?This will comprise close to half of the total x86 server market, estimated to be 33,323 units per year,? he explains. The next battleground will be desktops and notebooks, even though applications to make full use of multicore processors are yet to arrive. ?It will take a while before it reaches desktops in big numbers. Pricing will be a key factor. Dual-cores took off in a big way only when their prices came very close to single cores,? says Pushkal.
Stakes are high in this war for tech supremacy. While AMD is hoping to regain lost ground, Intel has already raised its quarterly earnings outlook. After a tough year, AMD is hoping to ride on Barcelona to come back in the game. AMD had about 10% of the global microprocessor market during the last decade, which dipped after the dot-com crash. However, it started gaining market share two years back with the introduction of its energy-efficient high-end Opteron microprocessors. But Intel came back with a series of new and advanced chips. After a few rounds of price cuts, it regained market share. Meanwhile, AMD is back in red and most analysts blame it on aggressive price cuts.
For AMD, quad-core is their chance to revive their fortune and they expect Barcelona to be a hit at least in the huge data centres, where efficiency is as important as processing speed. Though most analysts agree that Barcelona could make AMD far more competitive, most of them feel that AMD needs to do much more to claw back its market share lost to Intel.
Obviously, Intel is not going to sit idle. It is racing ahead with its new tech to shrink chip circuitry. With 45-nano production, Intel expects to consolidate its position later in the year by moving to 45 nanometre chips ahead of AMD, starting with a chip codenamed Penryn. Currently, both the companies use 65nm designs. Intel is also stressing it is well on track to ramp 32 nm technology in 2009 and has unveiled its first functional 32 nm static random access memory chips with more than 1.9 billion transistors each.
Clearly, battle in the microprocessors arena is not going to stop at quad-core but will keep moving higher in the multicore arena to 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 cores. And we could get some good theatre, blazing fast processing, new levels of power efficiency and better pricing.