AMD PCI Express to arrive in Q1 2005

CHIP FIRM AMD said that PCI Express for its Athlon64 family will arrive in the first quarter of next year.

That requires support from other manufacturers. The firm wouldn't say which chipset partners were designing for it, but it's easy to guess Nvidia won't be backwards in coming forward.

The real purpose of the now traditional AMD gig during Intel's jamboree was to show off the 90 nanometre dual core systems it was showing at Austin last week.

We caught the limousine that was moved on yesterday - driven by a very cool lady.

Ben Williams, vice president of AMD's server workstation business said that an HP system, the Proliant 585P, was ready to upgrade to twin cores when the chips are released in the middle of next year. IT managers could do that by replacing processor cards in the machines.

He said that the dual cores sit in the same die package with a 940 pinout. Only BIOS and other minor revisions are necessary to swap in dual cores from common or garden Opterons.

He said that keeping the same infrastructure was important to customers, and could lead to around 30% performance boost.

Market share for Opterons now hold close to five per cent of the X86 servers, with volumes from HP and others being shipped.

He said that the Dell Corporation was aware of demand from customers but wouldn't be drawn on whether it would ever launch machines using the chips.

He said: Our philosophy is not to go create disruption. We're listening to our customers and trying to help the customers' true problems. Dual core plugged into the same system and using the same infrastructure was almost a more important story than the dual chips themselves, he said.

The pictures are in turn the HP box, Windows Server 2003 showing eight cores running, Linux, the IBM box, and the inside of the limo, complete with real bottles of whisky and champagne and a real cool driver.