Stage Set - The Challenge

On the 23rd of August 2005, which incidentally was the first day of Intel's 2005 Fall IDF in San Francisco, AMD went public with their bold challenge to dual core supremacy. The rules were simple, AMD was prepared to face Intel in a live, public head-to-head competition pitting their highest performing AMD Opteron 800 or 200 series of dual-core x86 server processors against Intel's commercially equivalent chips, all in the spirit of fair play and openness. This challenge was called the AMD Dual-Core Duel 2005, which meant Intel had till Dec 31st 2005 to respond to AMD.

For a moment, this looked like the most exciting event to happen in 2005, but for one problem. Intel did not take the bait. In fact, Intel's CEO Paul Otellini shrugged it aside as nothing more than a publicity stunt, which they would not partake in. Of course, the refusal of Intel to take the challenge in itself spoke volumes and it wasn't an industry secret that AMD has been winning numerous enterprise performance benchmarks thrown at the Opteron in the x86 server arena. The end of 2005 draws near and AMD's challenge is about to expire. However, if Intel thought they could have ridden out the storm by laying low, AMD had other plans.

The AMD Dual-Core Duel.

On November 29th 2005, AMD took the matter into their own hands by taking their challenge to a new level. Instead of waiting for Intel's response, AMD went ahead to setup the challenge. The date and time was set on 6th December 2005 at 1pm and the venue chosen was – surprise, surprise – sunny Singapore. Complete with boxing ring and a host of regional press, you can bet www.hardwarezone.com was right there at center stage to cover this event.

The boxing ring. AMD's setup for the day's event.

Held at the glittery Ritz-Carlton Millenia hotel in Singapore, AMD's champs were two commercially available Opteron 800 series servers procured from AMD's partners. A Sun Microsystems Fire V40z and a HP Proliant DL585. Both servers were similarly configured with four-way Opteron 875 processors and 16GB memory running on AMD's 8000 series chipset. With the stage set, we waited for Intel to show up (though we doubted anyone in the room really believed they would).

AMD's champions, a HP Proliant DL585 to the left and a Sun Fire V40z. The smaller PC you see on the top left is actually an off-the-shelf HP DX 5150 PC upgraded with an Athlon64 X2 4800+, brought to run some desktop demos to keep us occupied.

A little close up of the two HP systems.

And now a close up of the Sun.

Some mild entertainment in the form of looping demos to keep us entertained. If only Intel would show up.

Now, remember that this event was a server showdown, so the room was pretty much bare of any exhibits to keep us fidgety journalists happy and enterprise servers are generally, large, noisy and boring. Thus, AMD had a side program to keep us occupied while waiting for the competition. For the first hour of the main event, AMD shared with us a brief highlight of their technology outlook for the next three years. Some interesting tidbits include enhancements to AMD's PowerNow! technology and further extensions to the AMD64 instruction set by 2007. DDR2 and virtualization technology will be the next big thing for next generation AMD microprocessors from mobile to servers and AMD's roadmap for 2006 includes updates to hardware security, which should be AMD's answer to Intel's LeGrande.