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AMD Announces August Release Date for Barcelona
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.'"
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.
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?
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
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
8 hyperthreading cores running 8 threads each, with each core having 2 ALUs and 1 FPU.
That's 64 concurrent threads, 16 ALUs, and 8 FPUs. And probably only needs a 150- or 200-watt power supply. There's a reason why Sun is getting something like $20K per UltraSPARC T1000 or T2000 rack-mount systems and can't keep up with demand...
Um, if you're talking about T1000 and T2000, that's 32 concurrent threads, 8 ALUs and 1 FPU. And the T1000 and T2000 start at $3995 and $9995, respectively. And lead time isn't any worse than their traditional single-core UltraSparc III based systems.
It's an apples to oranges comparison, anyways. Niagara has a wholly different design philosophy and a different set of trade-offs. The T2 cores are far more capable than the T1, but they are still relatively primiative compared to anything Intel or AMD are putting out, latency on common instructions and memory access are (often drastically) slower, and the clock speeds are significantly lower. The high concurrency successfully counter-blances the relatively low speed and high latency in certain workloads, but got spanked in real world tests (including web servers and databases, their target market) in benchmarks.
Apples to oranges. Niagara's design is based on lower speed, relatively primative cores using register switching to allow a lot of "concurrent" threads (most of which aren't actively executing at the time). They went with masking latency instead of reducing it (which, ironically, is pretty well the opposite of the UltraSparc III).