AMD's Barcelona to Outpace Intel by 50%

Gr8Apes writes "AMD is upping the performance numbers for Barcelona by stating that "Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance 'over the competition's highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency'". AMD also claims that the new 3.0 GHz Opterons beat comparable Intel Xeon 5100 series processors in three server-specific benchmarks (SPECint_rate_2006, SPECint_rate2006, SPECompM2001) by up to 24%."

Comments

Nice attempt, AMD.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Barcelona will outpace Intel's "current-gen" chips by 50%, not the ones that are currently in production. Nice attempt by AMD to become relevant again, though.

Re:Nice attempt, AMD.

[minginqunt]

Well, quite.

But you know what they say about lies, damn lies, and benchmarketing.

Or, if they don't say it, they ruddy well should.

Re:Nice attempt, AMD.

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, and notice that they say "at the same frequency", when Intel currently has a frequency advantage (not as big as P4, but then again Core 2 isn't an IPC dog like P4 was). Not that I expect any minor improvements Intel makes in the next 60 months to produce their own 50% leap in performance, this comparison still seems very suspect. As in pure marketing BS.

However AMD doesn't need to attempt become relevent again. They are currently very relevent. Did Intel become irrelevent when they were behind AMD on performance? No. In the past, AMD did lose more by not having the performance crown, and one could certainly imagine the momentum they were gaining in the K7 days fading quickly if Intel had come out with a superior chip. But today, AMD has both the marketshare and the OEM support to be merely competitive performance-wise and still be relevent. So they lose out at the top speed grades. If they can continue to match up their products to Intel's at lower speed grades, and they will, then they will continue to be a good choice for many people, and will definitely still be relevent.

Re:Nice attempt, AMD.

[MrFlibbs]

Note that AMD's claim is to be faster "at the same clock". When the P4 was pushing clock speeds into oblivion, AMD stressed the point that clock speed is irrelevant -- what really counts is how fast the system runs your software. How you get there is quite beside the point. How odd that AMD is now using clock speed as a key indicator.

Intel is already shipping 3GHz Clovertowns, and the article states that AMD has not released the Barcelona clock targets. It they ship substantially below 3GHz (2.4?), then Barcelona will probably still win on FP benchmarks (barely) but lose on everything else. This suggests it will be more competitive, but not compelling.

Re:Nice attempt, AMD.

[egomaniac]

Note that AMD's claim is to be faster "at the same clock". When the P4 was pushing clock speeds into oblivion, AMD stressed the point that clock speed is irrelevant -- what really counts is how fast the system runs your software. How you get there is quite beside the point. How odd that AMD is now using clock speed as a key indicator.

Ummm... they're not. If they were using clock speed as a metric, they would be saying "Look! We're running at 3.5GHz and Intel is only running at 3GHz!" while completely ignoring the actual performance -- exactly what Intel did all those years. They are instead talking about performance-per-clock-cycle, which (according to this) means that a 2.66GHz AMD chip would be considerably faster than a 3GHz Intel chip. We can expect them to continue touting the overall performance rather than raw clock speed, since they look better from a performance standpoint and worse from a raw clock speed standpoint.

How is that different than what they've been saying all along?

Re:Nice attempt, AMD.

[logicnazi]

Actually if Intel is running on 10 year old chip design technology (I presume this is primarily a remark about the FSB) then this suggests they have the potential to *radically* increase performance over AMD. If Intel's process advantages and chip design teams can actually gain a performance advantage while using 10 year old technology they can sit back and pick the low hanging fruit (changing to modern methods) and gain huge performance boosts while AMD has to do truly innovative things to gain any performance increases.

Frankly this sounds more like fanboi talk than a serious analysis. If your goal is to diss Intel and give AMD props then saying they are using 10 year old technology makes sense. If you are actually trying to argue that AMD's future is much brighter than Intel's it's totally non-sensical. If Intel can gain huge performance benefits just copying stuff AMD is doing now while AMD has to make huge advances just to stay competitive I know who I would put my money on.

Re:Nice attempt, AMD.

[Gr8Apes]

It's not purely about FSB, although that is a major short coming for multi-core designs. Intel won't radically improve their performance by going with a hypertransport design, but they'll improve their scalability (the quads are already beyond the maximum FSB - see the Xeon benchmarks for Mac Pros that's available). The 10 year old design refers to their falling back to the P-III core and then adding in a bunch of cache logic, fab processes and other more minor tweaks to improve that core's performance to what it is today in the C2D. The next major improvement for Intel's performance scalability is with Nehamal (I think it is) when they're supposed to finally implement a HTT type solution for memory communication, although I was unclear whether it also addresses multi-CPU/core communication. I would think it would, as anything less would be moronic.

AMD has other items up its sleeve. Not all are pure performance improvements, but interesting things like hardware virtualization. This will become more improtant in the future, and may even filter down into the consumer space. Wouldn't it be great for every app to essentially have its own virtual world? That would indicate a much lower potential for harm inherent to the OS architecture. (Note, odds are MS won't go this way because it breaks forced dependencies on the OS, but it certainly opens up new worlds for others)

Intel can't copy AMD's advances. They'd have to license some tech to do so, and that's not very likely (I believe HTT for instance belongs to AMD). Intel's current big performance leap occurred because they dumped P4 and followed AMD's approach. In any case, Intel did have a lot of smart people, but with the 10,000 personnel layoffs, how many of those smart peopel won't look for better jobs elsewhere? (Layoffs don't exactly inspire confidence for a company's future) Of course, AMD announced they may have to do the same after Q1's results.

Re:Nice attempt, AMD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Netburst was their new technology that was supposed to be "the future" and we all know how well that worked out

Actually, I thought "VLIW" & Itanium was supposed to be the future, and P4 was a product of the backup team. Core was a result of the laptop group that knew they couldn't make the P4 low-power so they cobbled something together using the best of P4 & P3 technology that wound up spanking the big brother in the real world.

Those two big misses let AMD catch up and surpass Intel (not to mention RDRAM & other smaller disasters born of Intel hubris).

i certainly hope so

[PhrostyMcByte]

It would be a shame if after what, 4 or 5 years? of being in the lead, AMD loses focus and stops making fast CPUs.

The last thing we need is for Intel to have no real competitors. Innovation would slow and prices would hike up.

Using "up to" in benchmarks and comparisons...

[jimstapleton]

has always bothered me.

"Up to" is sugar-coated for "You can't expect any better than this" with a implicit translation of "It can get a whole lot worse".

Ex: If CPU X get "up to" 100% more performance than CPU Y, but in all tests but one, actually has 1% of the performance, I'd rather have CPU Y.

"Up to" means nothing to me, except as an advertisement for the competator; whichever has the least unpleasant average and worst case performance is the one I'm interested in.

Re:Using "up to" in benchmarks and comparisons...

[Smidge204]

Actually, benchmarks DO have some real-world meaning - but only for comparison.

If your specific needs happen to be similar to the things benchmarks stress, then you can expect the results to be relevant. If your needs differ wildly from benchmark methods, then you can expect the results to be irrelevant - but most likely they will be equally irrelevant.

Benchmark performance is, at the very least, a better indication of relative performance than clock speed of cache size.

Fact is, few end users actually NEED the kind of power modern processors provide. How often does your typical web surfing, middle class consumer see a CPU usage above even 10%? Most of that power goes into running heavier and heavier GUIs and OSs instead of actual work anyway. Anyone who would actually use a machine for all it's worth will probably know enouh about computer systems to know if a benchmark rating is useful for them or not.
=Smidge=

"at the same frequency" is pointless

[Wesley Felter]

When the fastest Barcelona is ~2.5GHz and Clovertown is 3.0GHz, comparisons at the same frequency are pointless. What matters in reality is performance at the same price or performance at the same power or highest available performance at any price.

amd quad-cores are true quad-cores with a better..

[Joe The Dragon]

Chipset to cpu and cpu to cpu link with intel you have to use the chip set for one cpu to talk to another one.
Also If amd where to copy intel and put 2 dies on the same cpu they will have a better link for them that will not eat up chipset to cpu bandwith.

How much for HyperTransport?

[Anonymous Coward]

We already know AMD at 4-cores beats Intel. Its not due to processor design, but the mere fact that Intel can't feed its processors fast enough. AMD's HyperTransport provides the bandwidth, while their integrated memory controller helps hide the latency. Intel instead has traditionally favored larger and smarter caches to resolve this, but this doesn't scale as well. Their next generation will put them on even or better terms than AMD.

So, the real question is how the cores compare head-to-head? We need to know where this supposed gain is coming from, which will tell us how far behind (or ahead) Intel is.

Re:Yes!!!

[geekoid]

Historically, company come out with something 'unexpected and amazing' after a really disasterious quarter.
I would be prudent.

AMD needs to rebrand itself too

[Prien715]

I think one of the major reasons why AMD did so poorly last quarter was its silly marketing campaign. Towering signs on billboards and large airport ads tout AMD as "smarter choice", since it uses less power.

Marketing a chip as using less power is the same as having Toyota make an exclusive advertising campaign toward wheel-chair bound people: the group you're targeting has few people in it and they're going to research any product they buy. The server market is important, but when I buy my shiny new server, power consumption isn't my first consideration, nor is that the only thing AMD offers.

With this announcement, I'm hoping AMD starts a new slogan touting, say speed. That's what I buy a processor for primarily. AMD's always been fast for the cost and it's high time they market themselves as being faster and better rather than being "as good as" Intel. My new pick for a marketing slogan? "Upgrade to AMD" AMD should position its chips to be slightly more expensive at every pricing tier, but in doing so, blow them away in performance. (In the present economy, businesses have money and will gladly spend more money on products they feel are superior. Ford spends more money on marketing than BMW (but which would you rather own?). AMD should be trying to make Intel look like Ford, rather than being the "Ford alternative".)

AMD is marketing to a minor concern of a niche audience, while they ought to be using their superior performance (at a given price point) to sell hardware. Would you rather be a "power saver" or "upgrade to AMD".

Re:AMD needs to rebrand itself too

[bockelboy]

The server market is important, but when I buy my shiny new server, power consumption isn't my first consideration, nor is that the only thing AMD offers.

That's nice - but when we look at purchasing $250k - $500k of servers, power consumption as an important factor.

Back in the days when dual-cores were just beginning, this indeed was HUGE. Do you want 30% more Irwindales which would require 100 tons of cooling, or the AMD dual-cores which require 30 tons of cooling? The same is going to happen at the dual-core/quad-core boundary.

As CPUs are cheaper and cheaper and A/C systems remain a constant cost, the people who spend large amounts of money are going to look more and more at power costs. They're probably aiming at business customers who don't buy *a* server, but buy a *hundred* servers.

copmutronium

[Anonymous Coward]

Which one is faster is pointless. They are all wastes of space as long as they confine their chip production facilities to earth's gravity and atmosphere.

DISMANTLE MARS ALREADY

Re:Heh.

[xerent_sweden]

Yes, sadly, I have to agree to that. Then again, who knows what the next version of Word will require to display a blank paper?

Re:Why casual users can't be bothered

[networkBoy]

FWIW, it seems to be AMD doing all the posturing.
Intel seems to have taken a "no response" approach to media claims, instead producing product and letting guys like toms hardware do their thing. This isn't to say they don't advertise, but they don't take out full page NYT (or was it washington post?) ads chest pounding like AMD does.

-nB

What's really relevant ...

[Skapare]

What's really relevant to me is the performance per dollar ... not just dollar of CPU cost, but also dollar of whole system cost (including software, if that goes above zero), and dollar of energy cost (including the cost of shoving waste energy out the back door in seasons I does me no good to keep it indoors).

Re:Heh.

[Skadet]

[...] Learn how to sell and start earning what your [sic] worth.

I hate selling. I'm damn good at it, but I hate it. To quote Zoidberg:

It's all so complicated with the flowers and the romance and the lies upon lies!

Selling's about kissing ass and pushing off whatever it is you're selling on whoever has a wallet, no matter what their needs. Ok, at the retail level maybe not so much. But any sales job that pays close to 6 figures, yep.

Yeah, I'll pass. And I'll be doing what I want when I leave work at 4:30pm sharp, while you're closing a deal (still) at 9pm.

Real life tasks

[ceka]

It would be more relevant to know how does it perform real life tasks, eg kernel compilation time comparison...

I currently don't need more speed.

[LWATCDR]

Really I find my current PC fast enough. What I want is lower power and heat for the entire system.
Now if AMD can produce a cheap and silent system with good graphics performance I am all for it. Say something as fast as an X24400 and an Nividia 7600 GT all for about $300 then you have a winner. You will sell millions.
A quad core system? I just don't need it yet.

Re:Why casual users can't be bothered

[codemachine]

I think this has more to do with the fact that "Intel Inside" and such have been ingrained in people from Intel's past advertising. The general public is much more likely to have heard of Intel than AMD, which means AMD has a much greater need to get their name out there than Intel.

What socket?

[Unnamed Chickenheart]

What I want to know is - will this new AMD chip use AM2 socket, or a new version?