AMD Press Conference

The first thing on our agenda was AMD's press conference. AMD's main focus in the press conference was to discuss their upcoming 8th Generation processors, the Opteron and the ClawHammer, however, most of the focus was on the Opteron. The Opteron is AMD's server processor that supports 1 to 8-way configurations with no external logic required. AMD would not release any benchmarks or comment on the Opteron's performance, however, they made it quite clear that although there would be no more changes to the hardware architecture itself, they still had quite a long way to go as far as software optimizations are concerned (BIOS and operating system tweaks, etc). They did, however, have an early Opteron system on display that featured a 4-way configuration running a 64-bit version of SuSE linux (see images below).

AMD's Opteron and ClawHammer processors:

Opteron demonstration system running on a 64-bit version of SuSE linux:

The upcomming AMD 8000 chipset:

Also on display were a variety of motherboards for the ClawHammer manufactured by AMD's partners. These were all based on upcoming chipsets from nVidia, SiS, ALi and VIA, however, it is our understanding that they were just brought in for the show and working samples are not yet available. We could not obtain any detailed information on these chipsets at this time, however, Computex has only just started and if any announcements are made during the rest of the week, we'll be sure to keep you up to date.

Various speeches were made throughout the conference to give us an introduction into what the Opteron is and the specific market AMD we targetting with it. The speakers were K J Chou (General Manager of AMD Taiwan), Henri Richard (Vice President of Worldwide Sales), Richard Heye (Vice President of Platform Engineering and Infrastructure) and Mark Bode (Division Marketting Manager of AMD Athlon processors). These speakers basically detailed what has been listed above, except with the use of an easily understood Powerpoint presentation.