AMD Lowers Performance Projections for Bulldozer Opteron

While we are currently working on a detailed analysis of the AMD Second Quarter 2011 earnings call (which should follow within a few hours), we wanted to immediately share this detail in a breakout article: Without blinking an eye, AMD just lowered the performance guidance for their 16-core product Interlagos from 50% to 35%. Considering that the CPU integrates 33% more integer compute resources, this figure looks somewhat disappointing.

AMD Financial Analyst Day on November 9, 2010

Quoting Thomas Seifert, interim CEO and CFO at AMD, during yesterdays earnings call: “The Interlagos platform is our first server offering, optimized for today’s cloud datacenters and the architecture excels at compute-intensive and HPC workloads, where it will deliver up to 35% performance improvements compared to our current offerings.”

Their previous guidance has been a 50% increase in throughput, as evidenced by slides of their last analyst day held in November 2010 and numerous statements such as one coming from John Fruehe, Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation. By “current offerings” they refer to the 12-core Magny Cours processor. Due to the fact that no details regarding how these figures were determined are given, it is hard to draw any final conclusions. Still, it seems AMD recognized that the final product apparently can’t live up to their initial expectations. Possibly it also means that AMD is not able to ramp up clock speeds as high as originally planned.

Original Author: Marcus Pollice

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