Friday, July 4, 2003
The competitions in the 32 bit central processor unit (CPU) market will be over soon as Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) both made announcements on the 64-bit CPU introduction, claiming their supremacy in processing power.
At a June 30 product launch conference in Taipei, Intel announced the release of 64-bit 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processors, targeting the high-priced, back-end server market. Intel’s president and COO, Paul Otellini said: "These new Itanium 2 processors and Intel Xeon processors MP deliver world-class performance and price-performance, strengthening Intel's leadership over competitive enterprise solutions." Itanium 2, formerly code-named Madison, is said to have a 48 percent price-performance advantage over RISC platforms and deliver up to 30 percent to 50 percent greater performance than the previous Itanium 2 processor, code-named McKinley.
Processors using 64-bit architecture will become the wave of the future in the server market, said Intel Asia Pacific’s director of marketing Stanley Huang, but it may take until 2005 for Itanium 2 servers to become mainstream in the market.
Meanwhile, AMD recently expanded its family of Opteron processors with the 800 Series for 4-way and 8-way servers and the 100 Series for 1-way servers and workstations. The new Opteron processors join the AMD Opteron processor 200 Series designed for 64-bit 32-bit migration and based on the x86 instruction set. The 800 Series is scalable for up to 8-way servers and offers a non-proprietary server platform, AMD said, claiming that 4P servers based on the 800 Series offer the "world's highest performance" according to previously released benchmarks from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.
AMD is targeting the 100 Series at 1P server applications, like those used by Internet and application service providers, and workstation applications, such as engineering and digital content creation software. But the IT industry observers said that the battle is in the high-end server type while it will have little effect on the consumer and end users. Application software may not yet in time for these changes as many programs based on the 32-bit. For those computer enthusiasts whom want more power in playing 3D-games, DVD movie editing, huge file storage and graphic multimedia presentations. Still need three to five years for the whole IT industry able to harness the processing power.
By: DocMemory
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