AMD has its head in the cloud, and that may not be such a bad thing. The chip maker this week released another Opteron 1000 Series processor, codenamed Suzuka, with performance per watt and compatibility taking center stage.

"The flexibility of four cores and a low-cost infrastructure gives customers an edge when designing for a cost-effective or power-efficient platform," John Freuhe, director of business development for server and workstation products at AMD, wrote in a blog post.

Suzuka, which was designed for cloud computing, Web servers, small business servers, and other applications where lower power consumption is the primary focus, runs at 2.9GHz with 6MB of cache. And because Suzuka is based on the same core as Shanghai, existing AM2 platforms should only need a BIOS update to run the chip.

Image Credit: AMD

Jonathan Heiliger, vp of technical operations at Facebook, came down heavily on chip manufacturers Intel, AMD for making tall claims about server chips that eventually don’t live up to the hype. He was speaking at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco.

"The performance gains they are touting in the press, we are not seeing in our applications. We are literally in real-time trying to figure out why that is and if there are optimizations that we can do. Otherwise, we are kind of left with current-generation technology and current-generation scale," he said during a Q&A session involving GigaOM’s founder Om Malik.

He said companies like Facebook and Amazon require their servers to be both power-efficient and affordable. Heiliger also commended Google for its server-designing prowess.

 Image Credit: Darren Mckeeman (Flickr)

Intel appears to have hit a groove with its 32nm Clarkdale processors. Earlier this month, motherboard makers with the inside scoop reported that Intel had decided to axe its 45nm Havendale chips in favor of pushing 32nm Clarkdale chips in the first quarter of 2010. Those same sources are now saying Intel will begin mass-producing its 32nm chips in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Getting off to a big start, the company's 32nm Clarkdale processors are expected to account for 10 percent of Intel's total OEM desktop CPU shipments in Q4. By 2010, Intel expects that number to double to 20 percent.

Meanwhile, AMD is still looking to ramp up production in the middle of 2010 with mass production not expected until Q4 of next year, potentially putting Intel a year ahead of the No.2 chip maker.

Image Credit: Intel