AMD Finally Unveils Barcelona Chip

Justin Oblehelm writes "AMD has finally unveiled its first set of quad-core processors, three months after its original launch date due to its "complicated" design. Barcelona comes in three categories: high-performance, standard-performance and energy-efficient server models, but only the standard (up to 2.0 GHz) and energy-efficient (up to 1.9 GHz) categories will be available at launch. The high-performance Opterons, together with higher frequencies of the standard and energy-efficient chips, are expected in the out in the fourth quarter of this year. But it's far from clear that this is the product that will help right AMD's ship."

Comments

how well will it overclock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it's essentially the same tech since their X2 design?

I get 2.7ghz out of a 2.0ghz rated X2 (on air).

Once again they have beaten Intel's prices by at least $100 so we all win.

Cool

[afidel]

Literally. I can't wait to get in our first DL585 G2 with 4 of these beasties and 64GB of ram. The only regret I have is that we probably won't use em for DB servers because of Oracle's asinine policy of charging per core, sometimes I wish we had gone SQL2005 for more stuff as it is going to scale better with improving hardware. Then again maybe the proliferation of quad core (and above) server cpu's will make Oracle rethink their pricing policy again. I hope they go to what the rest of the industry is doing and license per socket.

Re:Cool

[Rogerborg]

Charging per processor (or machine) is par for the course for large "enterprise" software packages.

I think what the grandparent is distressed about is that they charge per core, rather than per physically discrete processor.

It is an interesting issue; what if you promised, honest Injun, to only use 3 cores of a quad-core CPU, for example?

I've been buying Intel/Nvidia . . .

[WhiteWolf666]

For a few years now, as that was the only platform that really, reliably ran Linux.

Intel's been good to us Linux folk, and Nvidia has been easy enough to deal with.

If AMD comes out with an end-to-end Linux solution, CPU, GPU, and a good Linux-friendly partner for chipset, I'll seriously consider switching back to AMD parts.

Re:I've been buying Intel/Nvidia . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting....I've been buying AMD/NVidia for a few years now for the exact same reason....

Clock for clock Barcelona is faster than Cloverton

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2.0GHz Barcelona beats the 3.0GHz Xeon X5365 (Cloverton) on floating point. Barcelona specfp_rate2006 score is 73.0 to Cloverton's 66.9. Things can only get better as AMD cranks up the clock in the coming months.

If you scale the benchmarks to the same GHz rating you will see that clock for clock Barcelona is at worst on par with Intel's best chip, and at best 80% faster on floating point. This is really quite amazing when you consider it's using the same amount of power as the previous 2 core AMD Opteron.

Re:"Full generation behind"?

[asliarun]

The die area of a given chip roughly halves with each technology node. This is not entirely true. Although I agree overall with what you're saying, core logic transistors scale much worse than cache as the manufacturing process decreases in size. I'm not sure if AMD factors this process disadvantage into their chip design, but it is an interesting design choice that they choose to stuff their chip real estate with logic transistors instead of cache. I'm sure that I'm oversimplifying, but I have a gut feeling that they possibly might be choosing to use less cache and more logic precisely because they know they will always be a process node behind Intel, and at least this way, their process disadvantage is somewhat compensated.

Interestingly enough, Intel has traditionally adopted the exact opposite chip design strategy. IMHO, Intel's design ethos is first driven by manufacturing, and only secondly by pure design. Of course, they have every right to do so as they've consistently led the industry in process and manufacturing technology. However, this sometimes teeters into arrogance, and they have tended to fix a shoddy design by throwing cache at it, and/or relying on a die shrink (which also fabulously shrinks cache!).

This process/cache luxury, compounded by bureaucracy can tend to make Intel come up with conservative designs. I'm not even going to talk about P4 or Prescott as it has been beaten to death and beyond. However, Justin Rattner recently hinted the same thing as well when he encouraged his research teams to come up with bolder and even impractical designs, and not start thinking about commercial viability so early on in the research/design stage. AMD, OTOH, simply cannot afford this luxure as they're usually getting whipped by Intel manufacturing AND by Intel marketing muscle, and are usually in a "do or die" mode. This usually makes them come up with riskier or bolder design.

Having said that, Core2 is a superb architecture, and in my opinion, will be neck-to-neck with even Barcelona (win some benchmarks, lose some benchmarks). Its only in the server space that AMD will have two distinct advantages: Hypertransport for scalability, and DDR2 instead of FBD for power consumption. Sigh... if only Intel had not scrapped Whitefield. I guess it would have released by now.. and that too with a native quadcore design and CSI. Look at the Tigerton hack-job for a contrast... pathetic (but of course, easier to manufacture).

Re:"Full generation behind"?

[Frumious Wombat]

Don't knock "easier to manufacture". The Cray3 and many other interesting designs failed because yields of some critical part never reached commercial viability. My first opteron servers (right out of the gate from a major vendor) had several failures, all due to the onboard memory controller frying. A little slower but fewer defects results in fewer recalls and less bad press.