Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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 catch up. Note to IBM: buy out AMD and set them on the right path before it is too late. There is great potential in their CPU designs, but without more cash and technology to speed up development to compete, they will die a slow death.
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 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.