AMD unveils ambitious two-year plan; to produce 12-core chips in 2010

08 May 2008

The computer chip arena seems set for the next battle royal between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), with the latter unveiling ambitious plans for the near future saying it would release its first six-core chip next year and a 12-core processor on a new platform in the first half of 2010.

However, company officials refused to comment on speculation that AMD could spin off its manufacturing arm as part of a new fab-lite strategy, while keeping its design group, essentially splitting the company in two.

Also, it is determined to move its chips to 45-nanometer (nm) manufacturing by the end of 2008. This takes the fight directly to market leader Intel who had been producing chips with 45 nm circuits since October. The number refers to the size of transistors on a chip.

The smaller the size, the more transistors that can be packed on a single die, boosting overall performance at the same or lower power consumption. Also, the central processing unit (CPU) and the graphical processing unit (GPU) can be combined on a single piece of silicon, a feature that AMD calls accelerated processing unit (APU).

Intel is due to release its own next-generation processor, code-named Nehalem, in the second half of 2008, as well as a processor with 6-cores during that time. With Nehalem, Intel plans to erase several advantages AMD has with its quad-core Opteron processor. These improvements from Intel will include a new high-speed chip-to-chip interconnect and an integrated memory controller.

In the product road map released 7  May, AMD indicated that it is planning to release the 45-nm "Shanghai" processor, which will contain four processing cores, sometime in the later part of 2008, although the chipmaker is not offering a specific release date at this point. This processor will contain 6MB of Level 3 cache compared with the 2MB of L3 cache in the company's current crop of quad-core Opteron processors.