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AMD Hardware

AMD Announces August Release Date for Barcelona 128

Posted by Zonk from the chip-love dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Rumors said the release wouldn't be until late Q4 but an August ship date is now promised for AMD's quad-core chips. They're only releasing up to 2.0 GHz processors at first, with the top speed devices coming out later in the year. 'AMD's Barcelona puts four cores on a single slice of silicon, an approach AMD calls native quad-core, and the company has argued that Barcelona will outperform the Xeon 5300. The only problem: that comparison soon will become obsolete. Intel's second-generation quad-core server processors, Harpertown a server member of Intel's Penryn family, will arrive this year, too, with the promise of better performance, lower power consumption and lower manufacturing costs by virtue of a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer features. AMD is only just now moving to a 65-nanometer process.'"
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AMD Announces August Release Date for Barcelona More

AMD Announces August Release Date for Barcelona

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  • Lowering the costs of manufacturing may be nice, but I don't think it's a particularly significant factor in their pricing model.

    Thanks, anyways.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by enjerth ( 892959 )
      I should have clarified.

      RE: Intel's Penryn family mentioned in the summary. Yeah, AMD may have higher manufacturing costs, but they're cheaper! DUR!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by edwdig ( 47888 )
      Lowering the manufacturing cost doesn't make a huge difference on the price marketing sets, but it makes a huge difference on what the engineering team does.

      The engineering team is given target transistor count based on expected manufacturing costs, which affects the cache size and feature set.
  • They were so vocal about "true dual core" and then "native quad core", they made it sound like it actually meant something important. Now they're paying the price - they can't manufacture it. All indications I've heard are that they're having production problems. Compare this with the alternative of just gluing a few dual cores together. AMD can mock this approach all they want, we'll see who's laughing when they're "next gen" chip underperforms (in many benchmarks, I'm betting) a previous gen competito

    • Re:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Friday June 29, 2007 @06:04PM (#19694783)
      Now they're paying the price - they can't manufacture it. All indications I've heard are that they're having production problems. Compare this with the alternative of just gluing a few dual cores together. AMD can mock this approach all they want, we'll see who's laughing when they're "next gen" chip underperforms (in many benchmarks, I'm betting) a previous gen competitor's chip and falls quite a way behind the competitor's "next gen" chip.

      Looks like you're mocking the outcome of a future event that has not happened yet.

      IT is a funny place to be: sometimes when it seems you're a total loser, you are, but sometimes, you come on top and kill the competition.

      It's all about the details, details which you don't know.

      • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 )
        True enough. I can only judge based on known information and rumor because, well, there's nothing else to judge on at this point. Based on those things it ain't looking good for Barcelona.
      • looks like your optimistic about a phantom product - i know which attitude i'd be adopting.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by t_ban ( 875088 )

        Looks like you're mocking the outcome of a future event that has not happened yet.

        that's right. if you must mock the outcome of future events, at least select those that have already happened. :-)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by fitten ( 521191 )
      Actually... it's odd, too... because AMD's architecture (HT/etc.) really lends itself nicely to MCMs... it should be almost trivial for them to make an MCM quad core part.

    • Re:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Friday June 29, 2007 @06:29PM (#19695023)
      Marketing hype is not relevant. It's not relevant when it's true. It's not relevant when it's false. It's not relevant when your marketing predicts a win and you win. It's not relevant when your marketing predicts a win and you lose.

      All the fanboyism and taunting and one-upsmanship and told-you-sos are worth exactly zero dollars.

      The chips will perform the way they perform. There will be benchmarks. People will buy based on cost vs. performance decision-making, not cost vs. hype decision-making.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by NateE ( 247273 )
        Marketing hype matters when you have ill informed, non-technical people making purchasing decisions.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kohath ( 38547 )
          Those people will buy a Dell or an HP. The guys at Dell and HP are not ill-informed.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jcgf ( 688310 )

            The guys at Dell and HP are not ill-informed.

            Working on their machines often makes one think otherwise.

      • All the fanboyism and taunting and one-upsmanship and told-you-sos are worth exactly zero dollars.

        If what you said was true, neither Intel nor AMD would spend a dime on marketting.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kohath ( 38547 )
          When the products are essentially the same, then the marketing matters.

          But not like the original poster meant -- he was saying AMD would be proven wrong about some hype-full marketing assertion and somehow "lose face" or something. It doesn't work that way. Hype is forgotten. If you remember it, you don't understand it.
          • Incorrect. As I clearly explained, my point was that AMD's insistence on "native quad core" may do them in because they can't manufacture the thing. Them losing face is more amusing and gratifying than meaningful.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by geekoid ( 135745 )
        hahahahaa...

        Marketing sells lots, and lots of crap. Many very good products cease to exist because of poor marketing(usually do to attitudes like yours) or a competitor out marketing you.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 2ms ( 232331 )
        If your theory that marketing is irrelevant were true then there wouldn't be maketing. The companies spend billions on marketing because it works. Most people who buy computers do not know squat so they buy based on image or reputation, obviously. Marketing and hype, obviously, affect people's perceptions of products.

        So, I really do not know what the hell you are talking about.

        Of course, all the hype everywhere these days is revolting. That has nothing to do with whether or not it works. How else do yo

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by niceone ( 992278 ) *
        The chips will perform the way they perform. There will be benchmarks. People will buy based on cost vs. performance decision-making, not cost vs. hype decision-making.

        I have noticed in the audio world (and I'm guessing in other areas too) it only works like this when Intel is ahead. When AMD is ahead a large number of people carry on buying Intel because it is Intel. It sucks to be AMD.

    • Re:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by semiotec ( 948062 ) on Friday June 29, 2007 @06:56PM (#19695225)

      I really hope that AMD can pull themselves out of the current slump.

      Their technology have always been competitive with Intel, regardless of whether they are holding the performance crown of the moment, and thus they provide the only true competition to Intel in the mainstream PC market. Unlike Via or the defunct Transmeta and others, which only managed to compete in some niche markets.

      we'll see who's laughing when they're "next gen" chip underperforms (in many benchmarks, I'm betting)

      Should AMD go down, even Intel fanboys are going to feel the pain when Intel starts ignoring the cheap segments and prices CPU whatever way they feel like. In a way, it'd be a worse monopoly than Microsoft, since it's much easier to create software from scratch than it is to create hardware from scratch. If the unthinkable happens, we can only hope that IBM (or maybe Sun) becomes interested in making x86 chips enough to provide an alternative, or provide cheap Power processors for desktops...

      Personally, I don't care who's got the highest performing CPU, as long as I can get cheap CPUs that will do the job adequately.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )
        I think that without AMD, Intel itself will actually go down in a slump. For most consumers faster CPUs are now "nice to have". Throw in the cheapest dual-core processor you can find and 2GB RAM (which has also come down a lot in price) and you got a very cheap yet powerful and responsive machine that'll run pretty much everything for a non-gamer. Throw in a video card like the GF8500 with full H.264 acceleration if you want 1080p HDDVD/Blu-Ray playback. Sure, it'll gradually creep upwards but I think the g

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by SacredByte ( 1122105 )
      You assume that Technologically superior products are always more successful than their inferiors, and that AMD's multiple core solution is in fact, inferior.

      for my first point, I would remind you of BetaMax, and Windows; BetaMax had technological superiority than its competition, but lost (Largely because of cost & capacity) To VHS; whereas Windows was vastly inferior to its competitors yet somehow managed to end up with the largest market share.

      As to my second point, AMD's design seems to have some ad
      • AMD's solution is provably inferior. It costs more to manufacture, has poorer yields, and doesn't perform as well. In fact, VHS was provably superior to Beta contrary to the urban legend. It had more capacity and hence provided more value to the customers to who it was marketed. You seem to confuse some kind of "engineering superiority in a few narrowly defined categories" for "meaningful technical superiority". The two are orthogonal.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by turgid ( 580780 )

      You, and all the other intel staffers, have my condolences. itanic was destined to hit the iceberg the moment it set sail, and now you've been out-engineered by a competitor who was once merely a minor nuisance.

      • Ooh, zing! Unfortunately, your baseless arrogance has no basis in reality. AMD is sinking like a rotting turd, and good riddance. They used to be a good engineering company, but they got a little too whiny and complacent and now they're suffering a much deserved smackdown. It's amusing that you would bring up "itanic", which nobody but you cares about one way or the other, to counter AMD's sinking ship.

        Have a nice trip back down to $12.

  • 65nm? (Score:5, Informative)

    by beavis88 ( 25983 ) on Friday June 29, 2007 @06:15PM (#19694883)
    AMD is only just now moving to a 65-nanometer process

    That's a nice thought, except it's totally wrong. All their Brisbane core X2 chips are on 65nm now, and have been for quite awhile.

    • Re:65nm? (Score:4, Informative)

      by samkass ( 174571 ) on Friday June 29, 2007 @07:24PM (#19695453) Homepage Journal
      AMD has been shipping 65nm CPUs of one kind or another for about 6 months now. However, the Athlon X2 line still has many 90nm parts in its lineup-- they're still in the process of moving to a 65nm process, as the comment notes. So "totally wrong" is probably less correct than the original statement.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zensonic ( 82242 )
        True. But that is most likely a production volume issue. AMD can not afford to turn out new FABs at the same rate as Intel can. Sad but true. They can only win this game by thinking smarter not harder!
      • Huh? Intel still sell processors fab'd at larger sizes as well ... Does that mean Intel is also still in the process of moving to 65nm???

        Nope, "totally wrong" is probably more correct than the original statement.
      • My 65nm X2 was dirt cheap and I bought it earlier this year. Good job AMD, I'm another satisfied customer.
    • No one has voiced it yet, but AMD's 65nm process is a failure. It's 65nm parts overclock worse than processors at 90nm process and that's probably why AMD are still producing all there high end parts at 90nm

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Crazy Eight ( 673088 )
        When did overclockablity become a valid metric?

      • No one has voiced it yet, but AMD's 65nm process is a failure. It's 65nm parts overclock worse than processors at 90nm process and that's probably why AMD are still producing all there high end parts at 90nm

        Then tell me why the Athlon 64 X2 3600+ Brisbane is an overclocker favorite?

        My 1.9GHz Athlon 64 is now running at 2.85GHz, limited by the maximum FSB on my cheapshit $50 motherboard. It's overvolted by 0.1v, and it's cooled by a $9 heatsink and powered by a 250W SFX12V 2.0 power supply. I don't have any

  • Not ruling AMD out (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tjstork ( 137384 ) <todd.bandrowsky@ ... UGARom minus cat> on Friday June 29, 2007 @06:30PM (#19695025) Homepage Journal
    Moving to native quad core has a lot of advantages and I'm actually excited to see how well this CPU will perform. Critics that claim that AMD lags behind in the process size would do well to note that AMD has ALWAYS lagged behind Intel in that category, and, yet, has managed to not only survive, but prosper.
    • Releasing a product in a timely also has a lot of advantages
      Releasing a performance commanding product also has a lot of advantages

      Currently Intel is king of the hill on both counts. If AMD has a 2GHz quad core, Intel could match with a 4GHz quad core ON THE SAME DAY.

      It is very hard to believe that AMD will be able to field a 2GHz part with 2x the performance of Intel's chip... that is what would be required to show a 40% performance advantage.
      • You are erroneously assuming that clock frequency matters across different designs. If I were to tell you I could sell you a working chip at 10Ghz would you want it? What if I told you all it had was an And gate and an OR gate and nothing else? How would that help you? IPC (instruction per clock), Bandwidth, Interprocessor latency, Thermal efficiency and Power draw all matter in the enterprise space.
        • Unfortunately for AMD I think Intel currently has the crown in IPC, thermal efficiency, and power draw :)
          • but when scaling out to 4+ sockets Intel's memory bandwidth and latency goes to shit
            • Too bad for AMD that is such a small, niche, market.

              AMD needs something for laptops, the hottest market now, in order to regain profitability.

    • Re:Not ruling AMD out (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cartman ( 18204 ) on Friday June 29, 2007 @09:58PM (#19696381)

      Moving to native quad core has a lot of advantages and I'm actually excited to see how well this CPU will perform. Critics that claim that AMD lags behind in the process size would do well to note that AMD has ALWAYS lagged behind Intel in that category, and, yet, has managed to not only survive, but prosper.

      AMD has always lagged behind in process technology, however they've usually only lagged behind by a few months. Now, however, the lag is more significant since Intel is moving to 45nm soon, while AMD is still in the transition to 65nm. I can't remember a time when AMD was nearly a full process generation behind.

      ..AMD has survived, true, but it hasn't prospered. AMD's split-adjusted stock price is about the same as it was in 1985. And AMD has taken significant losses in a great many of the intervening years.

      When AMD has prospered, it usually was because Intel management had made some colossal strategic mistake and AMD exploited it. For example, Intel management decided not to design a successor core to the PPro/PII/PIII until AMD had released the Athlon, because of their confidence in Itanium. And Intel strenuously resisted going to 64 bit on x86, again to protect Itanium. And Intel delayed multicore processors. In all of those areas, AMD was able to beat Intel to the punch, not for technical reasons, but because the people who run Intel made strategic mistakes in direction, over and over again.

      However Intel can bring colossal resources to bear, which matters because making CPUs is the most capital-intensive industry in the world. Intel has tremendous innate advantages because of their economy of scale and easy access to capital. Whenever AMD gains an advantage, Intel stops doing whatever stupid thing they were doing and re-commits themselves to beating AMD at the x86 game. When Intel isn't on the wrong path and isn't making silly mistakes in strategy, they almost always beat AMD and force AMD into heavy losses.

      This time, Intel doesn't appear to be making any silly mistakes, which is terrible for AMD. Not that I think AMD will go bankrupt anytime soon, but I suspect AMD will have a few "lean" years, like they did when they were selling K6's.

      • I wish there were some wiggle room in your assesment for equality in the chip wars, but I think you've justly captured the scenario. Intel need only refine C2 and avoid screwing up. AMD will play second fiddle for some time to come.
      • However Intel can bring colossal resources to bear, which matters because making CPUs is the most capital-intensive industry in the world. Intel has tremendous innate advantages because of their economy of scale and easy access to capital. Whenever AMD gains an advantage, Intel stops doing whatever stupid thing they were doing and re-commits themselves to beating AMD at the x86 game. When Intel isn't on the wrong path and isn't making silly mistakes in strategy, they almost always beat AMD and force AMD int
  • Wow, it'll be 6 or 7 usable ghz of computing power! WOW! We're a whole 1.4% of the way to that 500ghz CPU power that we were talking about in yesterdays article! Can you smell it? The future is coming!

    *snicker*
  • I hope they manage to avoid the problems that hit Intel's Core 2 Duo [slashdot.org], and squash some of their own bugs while they're at it. Or is it too late to handle those problems at this stage in the manufacturing process?

    • Re: (Score:1, Redundant)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )
      AMD has been manufacturing samples since January. I am pretty sure by August everything will be completely tested and bug proof

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Bacon Bits ( 926911 )
        Of course it won't be. Do people honestly think this Core 2 Duo thing is new and unique to Intel?

        What the heck do people think BIOS updates are?

  • Not for everybody (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tribbin ( 565963 ) on Friday June 29, 2007 @07:05PM (#19695301) Homepage
    Games can be specialized to use 4 or more cores.
    Servers will really use it.

    Mr. PC enthousiast who likes to rip DVDs and do other things in the meanwhile can do with 2 cores.

    I'm a multitasker who converts audio and video and downloads a lot while intensively browsing the internet. I see no need for me to go more than dualcore. If you are like me; better yet use the money on more happy HD-space, quiet cooling and memory.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Seumas ( 6865 )
      And at this point, I'm not aware of any game other than Supreme Commander that will actually make use of quad core (and boy does it need it).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tribbin ( 565963 )
        The new flight simulator by Microsoft will support multicore for scenery rendering and stuff.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Surt ( 22457 )
        Diablo 2 will make use of up to 8 cores. (Not that it will scale linearly, but it will get faster, of course, it being so far out of date these days means that it's already so fast you won't care).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aegl ( 1041528 )

      Mr. PC enthousiast who likes to rip DVDs and do other things in the meanwhile can do with 2 cores.

      Isn't DVD ripping (video transcoding) just a perfect application for 4 (or more) cores? CPU intensive, trivially parallelizable, takes long enough now that user will notice and appreciate a 4x (or more) speedup.

    • Is this a joke? Video encoding is a task that's relatively trivial to parallelize and is one of the more common tasks that receives pretty massive speed ups from it.

      The average DVD ripping guy is going to see more benefit from a quad core at this point in time.
    • Quake 3 was multi-threaded a lot, but in games such as it, I am not so sure that having enemy's and crates and whatever else on their own thread is such a good idea. A primitive, yet effective way to approach such a game can be illustrated with such:

      void Gameloop()
      {<br>
      ...
      Tick(); //Game engine moves in time one increment

      for (Index0 = 0; Index0 < World.Objects.Count; Index+=1)
      {
      World.Objects(Index0).React(); //Each object reacts to happenings in the previous moment
      }
      ...
      }

      To put it

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Surt ( 22457 )
        Even the most cpu intensive games tend to spend very little time in React(), and even if you do, partitioning that for loop and multithreading it tends to be trivially parallelizable.

        The real difficulty in multithreading games is multithreading the render phase. That's most of your CPU and GPU time, and it's hard to make parallel on the CPU side.
    • Um... ripping video and audio is ideally suited to multi threading, and hence multi-core.

      It's just a matter of parallelising software, and once it's done, the more cores the better.
  • It is unfortunate, because the only reason Intel killed off the poorly designed Pentium 4 was the strong competition, and the only reason you can buy a Core 2 Duo for under $150 is the competition from AMD. AMD is showing that it costs them more to make worse chips than Intel - since they have no choice, they are selling them at price points that often make them a great value, especially if you don't need the best performance per watt. But AMD isn't making enough profit to do the development they need to c
  • Hello! Oka- [gulp, nauseated expression] New teeth. That's weird. So where was I? Oh, that's right -- Barcelona!
  • I can understand that there would be a difference between chips designed for multiprocessing, but if I wanted to have a single-chip workstation, would there be any difference between the Barcelona and the Phenom?

    I'm interested in building new workstations for my company, and the Phenom chips look great except that they don't exist, and won't, for at least six months. Why not build Barcelona workstations, though?

    Thad Beier

    • The early Barcelonas will be designed for dual socket servers, and they'll be released at reasonably low clock speeds. If you want to make an 8 core workstation that isn't super fast on single threaded tasks, then they'll be a great deal. If you want a single socket system, you'll be spending more money for lower speeds than if you waited for the Phenom processors.

  • NPT (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Natales ( 182136 )
    I don't think the battle is only on the 45 vs. 65nm arena. There are other interesting technologies in the package that deserve some consideration. Barcelona will include Nested Page Tables (NPT) technology, which could potentially give a significant performance boost to memory intensive applications running on virtual machines once the hypervisors start supporting it.

    Intel will also be coming out with a similar technology called Extended Page Tables or EPT, but AFAIK their timeframe is early 2008.
  • AMD is using SOI, which as I understand, produces some benefit over Intels process at a given process size. If the benefit offsets 65 v 45, or comes close, I don't know.

    I do know that AMD sales have persisted in high-performance applications, simply because AMD's memory and IO architecture remain *much* metter than Intel's. Intel with Core 2 finally seriously had a competitor in terms of performance (i.e. very good floating point), but it will be interesting if Barcelona essentially matches the performanc

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