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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.