Intel, AMD Square Off With Nehalem And Shanghai

Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., and Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, Calif., are finally back to where it all started when the personal computer boom kicked off in the early 1980s -- squaring off with chips that bear more similarities than differences. That sets the stage for the kind of competition between the two main x86 microprocessor makers that has system builders like Brian Corn energized for a lively 2009.

"We're really going to be able to finally have an 'apples-to-apples' comparison on performance," said Corn, VP of marketing at Source Code, Waltham, Mass., discussing how Intel's new Nehalem processors will stack up against AMD's recently launched Shanghai chips.

"The next statistic to look at is who has the best power consumption. If you can have both the performance and power consumption lead, that'll be the crown jewel. AMD's new 45-nanometer chips look great out of the gate, but Intel's holding back on some of their information about Nehalem on the server side, so they might have an ace up their sleeve."

That ace could simply be a straight transport of the new Core i7 desktop processors' stunning power to Nehalem-based server chips to debut under the successful Xeon brand in the first quarter of next year. CRN's Test Center describes the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, among the first chips in the Nehalem class to be released by Intel, as having "the potential to drive current data center-class performance onto the desktop."

In other words, if the top Nehalem client chip could power a killer server, what is the fastest server processor going to look like when Intel drops it on the market?

AMD's play with its 45nm Shanghai client and server processors probably won't be to run them up against Intel's top-of-the-line Nehalem chips. Intel currently dominates the high-end of the x86 microprocessor market and will surely continue to do so in the coming days. AMD's value proposition will be in the middle portion of the market, where the smaller vendor will try to make the case that its chips offer a combination of energy efficiency advantages and capital expenditure savings for platform refreshes over Intel.

Corn first vocalized his excitement about the upcoming battle between Intel and AMD more than a year ago, when he pinpointed the current convergence of the two chip maker's product roadmaps as the beginning of an epic battle for CPU supremacy. That's because the two main x86 microprocessor makers took divergent architectural paths over the past decade, but in many ways return to the same general thoroughfare with the coming ramp of Intel's new Nehalem chips and AMD's 45nm Shanghai transition.

Intel's Nehalem micro-architecture, first represented in three Core i7 desktop processors released this past Monday, eliminates the Front Side Bus, integrates the memory controller on the die itself and independently powers each of the processor cores in these multicore chips for a "native" multicore design similar to the one that AMD embraced several years ago.

AMD, in transitioning to the 45nm fabrication process Intel pioneered a year ago, will match its larger rival on that technology node until Intel makes its next major transition to 32nm late next year.

The first products to emerge in this renewed battle aren't exactly alike. Intel's first publicly available Nehalem products are desktop chips, including the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, a blazing-fast 3.2GHz quad-core processor with 8MB of L3 cache that is priced at $999, or about $500 less than the top Intel quad-core built on the older Core 2 architecture. AMD, on the other hand, introduced its 45nm process on Nov. 13 with nine new Opteron server processors that feature higher clock speeds than the previous Barcelona generation for equivalent prices.

But as Intel and AMD build out Nehalem and Shanghai across more product lines, the "apples-to-apples" scenario Corn anticipates will really start to materialize. Intel already has Nehalem server chip samples in the channel, with a DP part planned for release in the first quarter of 2009 and MP parts scheduled for later in the year. AMD recently confirmed that it is following the schedule established with its first quad-core processors released late last year. That means the 45nm Shanghai server chips officially unveiled on Nov. 13 should be followed in about two or three months by 45nm desktop chips code-named Deneb (quad-core) and Heka (triple-core).

Next: Enter Nehalem