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

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.

65nm?

[beavis88]

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.

Re:65nm?

[samkass]

AMD has been shipping 65nm CPUs of one kind or another for about 6 months now. However, the Athlon X2 line still has many 90nm parts in its lineup-- they're still in the process of moving to a 65nm process, as the comment notes. So "totally wrong" is probably less correct than the original statement.

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.

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.

Re:Not ruling AMD out

[cartman]

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.

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.

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.