At last, AMD inaugurates the 45 nm quad-core Opteron era

In perhaps the most difficult period of its history, the company that re-introduced value and performance to the CPU market finds itself having to do the same thing all over again.

On the heels of Intel's announcement that it is beginning the phase-out period for the 45 nm generation of quad-core processors that it introduced only in March 2007, AMD is announcing the immediate availability of its "Shanghai" class quad-core 45 nm processors. With frequencies capped well below 3.0 GHz, just as AMD did with the "Barcelona" class, its marketing emphasis will continue to be on low-power performance.

With Intel at least one generation ahead, with AMD having to split its resources to survive, and with the terrible state of the global economy collectively providing it with a triple-whammy, this could be AMD's most difficult sale in its history. Although the company's most recent round of successes were in the consumer field, it was actually the server segment and Opteron processors which cemented its status as a potential price/performance leader. At the outset of the "green" era, better power performance continued to play to AMD's advantage going into 2005.

But today, AMD finds itself having been leap-frogged, with the result looking as though it's 1990 all over again. If it's to catch up, it will have to respond to the triple-whammy with a triple-play: Specifically, the new Opterons will need to provide optimum performance at lowest possible power per dollar.

To that end, AMD may already have two strikes against it. This morning, the company touted "a 30 percent performance to power ratio advantage over the 50W processor-based competitive platform." That's based on recent published results on the SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark, a new measurement system introduced by the independent SPEC assessment group only last July.

Intel's best performing low-power 45 nm processor with the profile AMD described was introduced last month: the L5430, at 2.66 GHz and 6 MB of L2 cache (the L5420 has 12 MB of L2), rated for a 50W power envelope. Today's AMD Opterons at up to 2.7 GHz has essentially an equivalent frequency, though it's rated for a 75W power envelope. AMD is claiming that its new Opterons can use less sustained power anyway, and that's going to be a tough case to prove.

SPEC's new benchmark rates what that group describes as "performance-per-power" (PDF of SPEC's methodology available here), where each unit represents an "operation per watt." The higher the number, the better.

AMD states that its recent tests with a new Opteron 2380 scored a SPECpower_ssj2008 rating of 761, whereas the similarly profiled Xeon scored a 561. Neither of those tests appear to have been published by SPEC at last check; the complete list of published specifications is here.

What that list does show, however, is a Dell PowerEdge 1950 EnergySmart III blade server with an Intel Xeon L5420 processor (at 2.5 GHz, that would be an upgrade from the EnergySmart's typical L5410 at 2.33 GHz), scoring a 744 on the SPECpower_ssj2008 test. What's more, we found a Fujitsu Siemens Primergy TX300 S4 tower server equipped with Intel's latest Xeon L5430 at 2.66 GHz and 50W, scoring an 827 on the same test.

So not exactly the 30% blowout that AMD suggests. Thus the third element of the equation -- the price -- will play a critical factor in determining Opterons' low-power viability going forward. The Opteron 2380 (the one AMD tested) will sell to manufacturers for $698 in 1,000-unit quantities. A copy of Intel's pricing sheet to resellers dated last September 21 prices its Xeon L5430 at $562 in quantity. It may indeed be a long winter for AMD.