Enterprise HPC | John West » Enterprise HPC news roundup: the Barcelona edition

September 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Enterprise HPC news roundup: the Barcelona edition

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Here’s a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from the recent enterprise HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com.

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AMD launches Barcelona, finally

It’s six months late and slower than originally expected, but AMD introduced its quad-core Opterons today. The company announced this week that they’ll be webcasting the launch event, set to take place at 6:30 pm Pacific Time on Monday, Sept. 10. You’ll be able to find the stream here.

In case you want to bone up before the event, the DailyTech has an outstanding overview of Barcelona, describing what’s significant about the new chip in terms of AMD’s previous products, and how the chip compares with Intel’s quadcore offerings.

Intel will respond soon with its 45nm Penryn processors.

HPC vendors rush to list Barcelona in product lines

There was a raft of announcements today as vendors moved to add Barcelona products to their offerings. Enterprise HPC vendors Appro, Verari, and Sun all made announcements today, as did mainstream HPC vendor Cray.

Many of these offerings were symmetric with offerings announced last week around Intel’s new quad-core Xeon 7300, including Sun’s quad quad-core 2U server.

AMD offers market debt to get itself out of…debt

AMD announced today that they intend to offer $1.5B of convertible senior notes to big institutional buyers. According to the release

AMD expects to use the net proceeds of the offering, together with available cash, to repay in full the outstanding balance of the term loan AMD entered into with Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc. in October 2006. If the initial purchaser exercises its over-allotment option, AMD expects to use the additional net proceeds for general corporate purposes, including working capital and capital expenditures.

I guess if you’re going to announce you need to borrow more money to pay off the money you borrowed you may as well do it on a new product launch day.

In the unlikely event that you’re a giant institutional investor reading insideHPC.com, the notes are due in 2012 and pay 5.57%. Financial details here.

John West summarizes the HPC news headlines every day at insideHPC.com, and writes on leadership and career issues for technology professionals at InfoWorld. You can contact him at john@insidehpc.com.

Posted by John West on September 10, 2007 02:20 PM

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