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Intel and Advanced Micro Devices’ latest server processors have come in for criticism from Facebook, the social networking company, for failing to deliver on promised performance.

According to Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, the latest generations of server processors from companies like Intel and AMD have failed to deliver anticipated performance gains. “The performance gains they’re touting in the press, we’re not seeing in our applications,” he said at the GigaOm’s Structure conference in San Francisco recently.

A massive consumer of servers, Facebook is constantly looking to upgrade its infrastructure as well as minimize power consumption to cut costs.

The hardware industry, too, has failed to deliver servers that are highly power-efficient for companies such as Facebook and Amazon, Heiliger said. “To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient.”

According to Heilinger, Google, which has designed and built its own servers, has done a good job.

In order to meet the needs of companies deploying large computing clusters, Heiliger said they should come together to develop common standards that vendors can design for.

AMD has launched its six-core opteron server processor, codenamed Istanbul.

Dasaradha Gude, MD of AMD India said, Across a single platform, AMD can address the need for more cores and power-efficient solution with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors.

But AMD’s celebration may be short-lived as Intel is due to launch its own eight-core Nehalem EX chip in the first quarter of 2010. We cannot compare our product with Intel s despite some similarities since the market segment are applications are different, said Gude.

The six-core AMD Opteron processors leverage existing platforms infrastructure and a low-cost, power efficient DDR-2 memory architecture which can help lower system acquisition costs besides HPC, virtualization and database workloads can benefit from increased 4P STREAM memory bandwidth of up to 60% enabled by HyperTransport technology HT Assist, which helps reduce processor to processor latency and traffic.

The processors are expected to be available from this month from OEMs including HP, IBM, Cray, Dell and Sun Microsystems along with support from motherboard and infrastructure partners. Some of the ISV partners of AMD in India include Citrix, Motorola, Novell, Oracle, Parallets, RedHat, Sun Microsystems, VMware and Xeon.

Besides AMD has also appointed two regional partners like Digital Waves and Wipro. The HE, SE, and EE versions of the six-core AMD Opteron processor are planned for the second half of 2009. Intel and AMD have clashed in past years over performance and price, and squeezing as many cores into a single microprocessor has been one way to boost performance.

XFX, a technology manufacturer of high resolutions computer graphics and computer accessories will provide products based on AMD ATI Radeon series this year.

We are excited with this technology partnership as it allows us to incorporate current and future ATI graphics technology into our graphics card designs. This partnership will enable our R&D teams to develop a wider range of XFX graphics products, said Sunny Narain, VP, regional sales, XFX Speaking on the new technology partnership, Patrick Wong, director graphic sales, APAC, AMD, said that India graphic card market is growing exponentially, and AMD sees a lot of potential for our graphics and high resolution work portfolio.

A study by Nasscom estimates games industry to reach 300 million by 2009 and animation industry to reach $950 million by 2009, which requires graphics cards and other computer peripherals.

There wasn’t much in the way of good news on Thursday, but Amazon was a bright spot.

Sales warnings from Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) weighed on the tech sector on Thursday, while the broader market fell on worries about the fate of U.S. automakers and Friday’s looming jobs report.

Adobe lost 9% and AMD 5% on their warnings, which they attributed to the dramatic economic slowdown that began with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in mid-September.

AMD said the consumer market is particularly weak. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), which issued its own warning last month, lost 6.5%.

Cirrus (NASDAQ: CRUS) plunged 31% after lowering sales guidance, but Nokia (NYSE: NOK) managed a 4% gain despite lowering its market outlook.

Despite generally dismal November retail sales, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) ended the day 4.7% higher on a Barclays upgrade that cited the company’s strong competitive position in a slowing economy.

Synopsis (NASDAQ: SNPS) was another standout, jumping 12% on a better than expected earnings report and a Citigroup upgrade.

AT&T (NYSE: T) was the latest company to announce massive layoffs. Its shares lost 3%.

Concern that Congress may not bail out automakers and worries ahead of Friday’s monthly government jobs report sent the broader market sharply lower, but stocks finished off the day’s worst levels. Friday’s Labor Department report is expected to show a loss of 325,000 to 350,000 jobs for November.

The Nasdaq lost 46 to 1445, the S&P fell 25 to 845, and the Dow tumbled 215 to 8376. Volume declined to 6.6 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.08 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 27-10 margin on the NYSE, and 20-8 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 78% on the NYSE, and 83% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 28-206 on the NYSE, and 3-134 on the Nasdaq.

AMD has announced the availability of Opteron processors on the 45-nm node with the launch of “Shanghai,” its first 45-nm server processor.

The processor helps reduce complexities with innovations that offer superior virtualization performance and increased performance-per-watt, the company said.

Flawless execution in bringing the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor to market early results in new performance leadership on x86 servers,” said Dasaradha Gude, Managing Director, Computing, AMD India. “In concert with our OEM and solution provider partners, AMD is addressing the need for enterprises to focus on their bottom line while giving them the innovations they need to build for the future. This enhanced AMD Opteron processor represents the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products since the introduction of the world’s first x86 dual-core processors by AMD nearly four years ago.”

The processor offers a balanced and scalable solution to support today’s increasingly heterogeneous computing environments. Through improvements to AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture and innovative AMD-Virtualization (AMD-V) technology, the new processor delivers faster world switch time, which enhances virtual machine efficiency.

AMD and Red Hat Demonstrate Live Migration of Virtual Machines Across Vendor Platforms: See For Yourself

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — November 6, 2008 — AMD (NYSE: AMD), in collaboration with Red Hat, today demonstrated for the first time “live migration” of a virtual machine across vendor platforms. Live migration enables the movement of running virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another without disrupting service to the end user, something that, till now, has only been demonstrated across systems based on one vendor’s platforms. Today’s live migration demonstration moves a live VM from an dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to a system based on the forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor, utilizing Red Hat’s high-performance open source virtualization software. See the demonstration on the AMD Unprocessed YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuhU6jJjpAQ or on AMD at http://www.amd.com/amdlivemigration01 .Industry interest in live migration has grown as virtualization technology has become more widely adopted. Live Migration of VMs across physical servers is a vital component of data center management that enables IT managers to move VMs as necessary in order to perform tasks such as upgrading or conducting maintenance of a server, balancing the server load and proactively managing the server availability to avoid downtime or lost data. The demonstration illustrates AMD’s approach to an open and collaborative relationship with its partners to meet customer demands.

Red Hat and AMD were able to achieve this feat through the combination of Red Hat’s innovative, high-performing virtualization technology and the consistent and reliable architecture of the AMD Opteron processor.

“While developing this capability has been a challenge, we are proud to work with Red Hat to demonstrate it is possible,” said Margaret Lewis, director, Commercial Solutions and Software Strategy, AMD. “We are dedicated to working with technology partners, and even our competitors, to help bring solutions to market that address the needs of our industry.”

“The demonstration of high-performance virtualization and live migration between heterogeneous server platforms helps to illustrate Red Hat’s commitment to open, standards-based infrastructure,” said Navin Thadani, Senior Director, Virtualization Business at Red Hat. “We are fully committed to bringing the highly successful open source model to the virtualization domain. With it, Red Hat delivers leading, standards-based virtualization solutions in terms of scalability, security and cost-performance.”

For more information on AMD virtualization and processor technology, please visit:

http://www.amd.com/virtualization .

To read more about Margaret Lewis’s thoughts on virtualization, please visit:

http://blogs.amd.com/virtualization .

Recently Chipmaker Intel Corporation plays the game against Advance Micro Devices (AMD) and paid retailer not to sell PCs using chip made by AMD. This new accusation made by European Union Antitrust Regulators.

The ’statement of objections’ from the European Commission is an expansion of the 2007 charges that Intel gave computer makers rebates to limit their use of AMD chips or avoid them altogether.

According to this, commission is now weighing charges Intel unlawfully swindled with both the wholesale and retail channels in an effort to contain its rivals

Intel lawyer Steve Rodgers stated that “he was disappointed by the new charges, which centered on whether it was lawful or not to issue price discounts. The result will be higher computer prices because it prevents Intel from offering discounts“

Intel was given eight weeks to respond to the charges. It would study them in detail before responding to the Commission in writing.

So it is very surprising that technology giant is following such kind of unethical marketing strategies. There must be a healthy competition in the marketing. I hope in future, we will not hear or read such kind of shameful things again.