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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is my sig.
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.
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.
Marketing hype matters when you have ill informed, non-technical people making purchasing decisions.
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.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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).