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AMD Quad-Core Opteron (Barcelona) Tech Report

Posted by Zonk on from the lovely-place-for-a-chip dept.

crazyeyes writes "AMD has been very tardy with Barcelona. Countless AMD fans have eagerly awaited a new processor. As the day draws closer, TechARP takes a look at the upcoming quad-core AMD Opteron. Is there more to it than just its four processing cores? Will it be the Intel-killer that AMD promised long ago? From the article: 'AMD is in the same boat as ATI. Delays after delays of their long-awaited Barcelona core not only ensured the dominance of their rival, Intel, in the desktop processor market, it also ensured that Intel would be the only choice for those who want a quad-core processor. Although that wait will end in August, 2007 when the Barcelona is finally launched, it remains to be seen if AMD's new processor will be able to inflict serious damage to Intel's dominance.'"

2 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Better quad-core how? by bluSCALE4 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's because you're not aware of the power of using the GPU in coordination with the CPU. Folding certainly shows GPU as a force not to neglect. You also fail to realize into your comment that quad cores are two dual cores. AMD and Motorola would do this sort of thing to claim next tier technology when in reality they were today's tech on steroids (They often fix GHz speeds with two CPU sets). Now, for some reason, AMD has opted not to do that and we'll see the true worthyness of this strategy with the release of the true quad core.

  2. Re:That's what you get... by fm6 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There has yet to be a dire 'need' for 64 bit processing...
    As usual, slashdotters are critiquing the computer marketplace as if it were all about them. It's not.

    Of course nobody's running 64-bit applications at home on at the office. Because the dominant player there is Microsoft — whose 64-bit support on the desktop is either lame (try to find even basic drivers for XP-64) or a nightmare (try to run Vista-64 at all!). Can't really run 64-bit apps without a 64-bit OS, can you?

    On the other hand, there's a huge demand for 64-bit apps that run on high end workstations and servers. How do think AMD managed to grab so much market share so quickly? By finding a way to meet that demand ahead of Intel, that's how.

    If it weren't for this demands I wouldn't have a job — documenting x64 servers for Sun. Yes, Sun. Its a big profit center for them these days.

    At work, I'm the Sysadmin for a dedicated hosting company (Linux, mostly Gentoo), and even in that market I don't know of any of my users running 64bit. any performance advantages are outweighed by incompatibilities and plain old PITA to get things working.

    All that tells us is that Gentoo 64-bit support sucks and that you're not supporting any high-end applications. What have you got, some low volume commerce and web presence sites? If you were doing millions of transactions a day, you'd be needing to squeeze all the performance out of your servers you could manage. Which is why the big boys run serious 64-bit OSs: RHEL, SLES, Solaris, Windows 2003.