AMD to make a splash in the server chipset space

Advanced Micro Devices plans to deliver a new server platform in the first half of 2009, the company announced on Friday, with the platform revolving around a new chipset.
The new chipset will be geared toward servers, with multiple sockets to plug in additional server chips. The chipset could improve the way chips in multiple sockets and components like graphics cards communicate with each other. The improved performance comes through new virtualization capabilities and support for HyperTransport 3.0 bus technology, according to the company.
AMD's upcoming Shanghai server chips -- which will be delivered in the fourth quarter this year -- will go into this chipset, said Phil Hughes, a company spokesman. Shanghai chips will also go into Nvidia and Broadcom chipset offerings.
This could be a significant announcement for AMD as the company hasn't had a server platform that included a chipset since the very start of Opteron around 2003, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. Most of the AMD servers today contain either Nvidia or Broadcom chipsets, he said.
The new server chipset won't necessarily boost AMD's processor business, but server vendors do not accept desktop chipsets, he said. AMD has a strong presence in the desktop chipset business, and the server chipset could open a new market for the company, McCarron said.
Though the input-output performance on the chipset will improve with the new features, it is not designed to boost processor performance, McCarron said. That will solely depend on how Shanghai chips perform.
Shanghai chips will be the first manufactured by AMD using the 45-nanometer manufacturing process. Desktop offerings manufactured using the 45-nm process technology will closely follow, said Randy Allen, senior vice president of computing solutions at AMD, during a conference call on Friday.
AMD is in talks with server vendors to finalize its Shanghai-based server shipment schedules. Based on how those discussions go, AMD hopes the servers will be in the market by the end of the year, Allen said.
AMD is roughly a year behind Intel in shipping chips based on the 45-nm technology, but efforts are underway to close the gap, Allen said.
The server chipset announcement may be an attempt by AMD to pre-empt Intel's server-based announcements at its Intel Developer Forum show next week in San Francisco. Last year, AMD announced the Phenom triple-core chip prior to the start of IDF.
AMD executives spent a lot of time on the conference call berating Intel for photocopying its past innovations, including quad-core processors and chip technology.
"It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we certainly see that in play here. But at another level it is somewhat annoying when you see the over-the-top rhetoric they utilize, and at some level you get mad," Allen said.
AMD has historically announced products prior to IDF to show that it is still alive and should not be forgotten, Mercury Research's McCarron said.

:computerworld.com

Google's unhappy Android developers

Google has led a largely blissful existence, fostering a widespread perception -- sometimes in direct contradiction to the facts -- that it can do no wrong. Yet the company's controversial Android mobile platform venture threatens to seriously dent this notion, at least with some of the people it needs most.
As it readies its long-anticipated open mobile OS for public release, Google is behaving in a way that threatens to permanently taint its relationship with many Android developers. The company's actions -- including restricting access to key development tools and allegedly treading on open source principles -- have created, if not a full-fledged revolt, at least a sense of disappointment and disillusionment among many in the tightly knit Android development community, which numbers perhaps 2,000, according to an estimate by AndroidGuys, an independent Android blog site. Some developers have threatened to shift their attention to other mobile platforms.
Mike Novak, a New York-based independent Android developer, says Google may be guilty of taking its developer base for granted. "Developers are the driving force behind Android applications, so without them it would be very hard for Android to have a stance in the market," he says.
Casey Borders, an independent Android developer in Columbus, Ohio, warns that Google will have to work hard to retain developer loyalty and attract new developers to its platform. "The Android platform has a very strong base and a lot of potential, but it also has a lot of competition," he warns.
The Android SDK controversyAt the heart of the developers' discontent is the status of the Android Software Developers Kit (SDK). In July, Google announced that the latest SDK would be released first to the 50 winners of its Android Developer Challenge (ADC), a US$10 million contest that the company is using to find the best and most innovative Android applications -- "cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users," as Google says on its ADC Web page.
While many developers cried foul, Google claims its SDK decision was designed to help the development community. "The ADC finalists are helping us update the latest version of the SDK before we release it to the world in the coming weeks," the company said in an e-mailed statement. "We wanted to limit the challenges developers face with an early release in a particularly critical time during the challenge to not disadvantage them. We've separated the scheduled releases to not disadvantage these winners who are competing for money and the public will receive a release of the SDK soon with more documentation and tools."
But the news that Google was reserving its latest and best development tools for a handpicked group, as well as failing to announce a firm date for the SDK's general release, hasn't gone down well with many developers.
For many in the closely linked "Androidsphere," Google's announcement seemed to come out of nowhere, stinging keenly and contradicting the company's vaunted developer-friendly reputation. Borders believes that Google's decision violated an open source guiding principle. "The idea with open source software is to allow early adopters access to the buggier pieces of code so they can help fix them or let people who want to wait for a solid release the ability to do that," he says. "The key is choice, and Google has taken away that choice and is developing Android like every other piece of closed software."

:computerworld.com