US microprocessor maker AMD launched its latest quad-core processors in Beijing yesterday, the first stop of its global launches.

The quad-core Opteron processor claims to be the world's most advanced computer chip with a performance 50 percent higher than the current dual-core products.

Its arch-rival Intel launched a similar quad-core product last week, but AMD claims its product is the only one with four cores in the same semiconductor die.

"The selection of China as the first location to release the chip, Barcelona, proves the importance of the China market to AMD and also shows our development in the country has entered a new stage," said Karen Guo, senior vice-president and president of AMD Greater China.

Phil Hester, senior vice-president and chief technology officer of AMD, said his firm has been delivering products to customers in large volumes since last month and plans to launch products for desktop computers within the year.

Computer makers like IBM, HP, Dawning and Dell will launch over 50 servers using the AMD model.

In the enterprise processor market in the country, AMD has a very small market share, much lower than Intel. But in the overall computer processor market, it had a share of 28 percent in the second quarter, up 6 percentage points from the same period last year, according to the research house Gartner.

While AMD's market share in the consumer computer processor segment increased to 43 percent, its share in the notebook market almost doubled in the period.

The chipmaker is also likely to play a role in China's plan to develop supercomputers with a speed of over 100,000 giga-floating point operations (flops).

Huai Junpeng, chief of the high-performance computing group in the national hi-tech 863 Project, yesterday said the country aims to develop two such supercomputers before 2010 and is doing studies for next-generation computers 10 times faster than these two.

The supercomputers, whose speed can put them among the four fastest computers in the world, are likely to make China the second country with such high-performance computers, which are widely used in complicated projects like weather forecasts and oil exploration.

Two different teams, under Dawning and Lenovo, are working on the 100,000 giga-flops computers.

Zeng Yu, R&D general manager with Dawning, said the quad-core Opteron processors from AMD would be a good choice for large-scale industrial use.

(China Daily September 11 2007)