Is AMD Brewing New Opterons?

Posted benchmarks, price cuts may signal new processors on the way.

Benchmark results for unannounced Opteron processors posted on Advanced Micro Devices' Web site, coupled with steep price cuts on the Opteron, suggest that AMD is planning to introduce three new Opteron chips in the coming weeks.

AMD has Composite Theoretical Performance benchmark results for the nine previously announced Opteron processors posted on its Web site. But results for the unannounced Opteron 146, Opteron 246, and Opteron 846 processors are also listed on that Web page.

The new processors are expected to offer speed increases over the current Opterons, but no major changes to the cache or architecture.

An AMD spokeswoman declined to comment on unannounced products.

Falling Price, Rising Demand

On Monday, AMD cut prices for several of its processors, but the Opteron prices declined sharply. The Opteron 144 now costs $438 in quantities of 1000 units, down from $669 on June 30. The price of the Opteron 244 also declined, from $794 on June 30 to $690 on Monday; but the price of the Opteron 844 remained at $2149. Price cuts commonly signal that a chip maker plans to introduce a new processor.

The Opteron has been out in the market for just about a full quarter since launching in April, and performance reviews have been positive so far, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research in Cave Creek, Arizona. The Opteron chips are competitive with Intel's Xeon processors for 32-bit servers, and have the added bonus of 64-bit performance, he said.

In the last quarter, AMD shipped roughly 8000 to 10,000 processors, which falls in line with Mercury's expectations, McCarron said. Server customers are slower than PC users to adopt new products, because most businesses insist on a testing and validation program before adopting any new technology to run their business applications, he said.

The Sunnyvale, California, company announced last week that China's Dawning Information Industry Company will use the Opteron to build a powerful supercomputer.

Support for the Opteron should continue to grow when Microsoft releases the Opteron version of Windows Server 2003, McCarron said. A production version of the operating system is expected to be out before the end of the year.

AMD will release the desktop version of the Opteron, the Athlon64 chip, on September 23.