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.'"

Comments

Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in.

[RightSaidFred99]

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 competitor's chip and falls quite a way behind the competitor's "next gen" chip.

Re:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in.

[suv4x4]

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:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in.

[Kohath]

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:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in.

[semiotec]

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:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in.

[NateE]

Marketing hype matters when you have ill informed, non-technical people making purchasing decisions.

Re:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in.

[SacredByte]

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 advantages over Intel's, most notably in how it manages the cache; With Intel's quad core, to move data from one core's cache to another's, it has to go out the processor's bus, and back in again, thus creating an unnecessary bottleneck on performance. In AMD's quad core it doesn't have to move the data through the bus for it to be accessible by another core. I'm not sure how useful this is in real world applications, but sure looks good on paper.

Re:Marketing and hubris may have done AMD in.

[niceone]

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.

Not ruling AMD out

[tjstork]

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.

Not for everybody

[Tribbin]

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.

Actually, yes, Intel does create these randomly.

[WoTG]

AMD and Intel have cross-licensing deals that handle the instructions that each company creates... these deals go way back to the mists of x86 time. So, for AMD to implement SSEn there is no legal problem. Ditto for the reverse. Except, the "problem" is that Intel w/80% of the market can pretty much dictate what instructions will survive in the market -- with the big exception of x86-64, and potentially some of the new virtualization stuff.

Now, about releasing chips in a timely manner... the trick is Intel doesn't have to tell anyone about the new instructions until they are well on their way to being in Intel CPUs. AMD finds out about these things at the same time as software developers get the promotional material from Intel. There's no way for AMD to release chips with these functions at the same time as Intel - they have to wait until the next moderate chip revision.

Does it matter? Usually not. Most software lags instruction changes by years. The exceptions are typically where performance really counts. For example, video encoders picked up on SSE2 pretty quick, since it provided dramatic improvements for their code.

Re:Nothing but downhill for AMD

[Martin Blank]

Also, Intel can't buy AMD (I think they actually tried once, many years ago) due to anti-trust legislation.

PlugPlover never said anything about Intel buying AMD. He suggested that IBM buy AMD, which would be more natural as IBM has collaborated with AMD on numerous aspects that advanced the CPU world, such as SOI and copper interconnects.

Re:AMDs 65nm process big let down

[Crazy Eight]

When did overclockablity become a valid metric?