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AMD appears to be staggering its 45nm quad-core desktop processor release schedule. It's preparing to release one this quarter, but the next two won't ship until toward the end of the year - before January 2009, is what the chip maker's said to be telling mobo makers. First up, there's the successor to the current Phenom X4 9750, a 125W beast that will be superseded later this quarter by a 45nm version of the chip. The new 9750 will only consume 95W. So say said industry sources, cited by a variety of Chinese-language websites. The current 9750 is clocked at...

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday released pricing for the nine models that make up its newly launched quad-core x86 microprocessor family, codenamed "Barcelona." Officially known as the Opteron 2300 and 8300 series, the CPUs are AMD's first entry in the quad-core space. Market leader Intel launched quad-core chips for servers and workstations, as well as for desktops, on Dec. 13, 2006. Pricing for 1,000-unit tray quantities of the nine processors ranges from $209 to $1,019. The 2300 series of 2-way quad-core Opteron processors comprises the AMD Opteron 2344 HE (1.7GHz, 55W) at $209, 2346 HE (1.8GHz, 55W) at $255, 2347...

With Intel coming on pretty strong with its "Clovertown" Xeon 5300 processors and Advanced Micro Devices having to get to June or July before it gets its own quad-core "Barcelona" Opteron chips out the door, the company has to do something to make its Opterons appealing. To that end, AMD has pushed up the clock speeds on the dual-core Rev F Opterons to 3 GHz to compete better in the dual-core X64 chip space. According to Pat Patla, director of Opteron marketing at AMD, the new 3 GHz chip is a so-called Special Edition, or SE, part. This means that...

AMD's much hyped "4X4" system today brings dual socket Athlon 64 FX processors to the desktop allowing two dual-core AMD processors to be used. This in effect gives us a quad-core system and paves the way for a true octo-core desktop platform next year.Introduction If you take a look back at the microprocessor industry, and more specifically the battles between Intel and AMD over the last few years, you see that a see-saw pattern of enthusiast market dominance tends to emerge. We see either Intel or AMD on top for a while, then due to an ambitious product launch or...

Micro-Star International (MSI) on November 17 unveiled its P6N Diamond (Nvidia 680i chipset) and P6N SLI Platinum (Nvidia 650i chipset) motherboards which support Intel's quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700. The two models are aimed at the high-end gaming segment, MSI indicated.

Just as the bragging rights for dual-core chip supremacy are dying down, Intel gave the first glimpse of a quad-core chip coming next year. Clovertown, a four-core processor, will start shipping to computer manufacturers late this year and hit the market in early 2007. Clovertown will be made for dual-processor servers, which means that these servers will essentially be eight-processor servers (two processors x four cores each). The company will also come out with a previously announced version called Tigerton around the same time for servers with four or more processors. Core expansion will be a dominant theme for Intel...