I was ticked when Sun seemed to drop AMD for Intel. This article really seems to make sense, though - AMD's thumbed their nose at their best supporting OEM, at a time when Intel's product's getting damn good. And with AMD well known in the HPC niche, too. Not a good move.

Looks like AMD thinks it is Intel. Hector is making Intel-size blunders, but without an Intel-sized budget.

Shame. After getting the channel riled up against them, now they go off and get major customers riled up as well.

Hey Hector ! Are you actually TRYING to sink your own ship ?

I think you should be the one making the roadmaps for AMD, it certainly seems that they have lost their way.

Yeah, JAVA always doing things that no one could understand at its time, AMD should listen to JAVA,

eg. the network is the computer, as the SME market is huge, 8S system is rare for them,

if AMD not act fast, I would feel that they might need some MSFT money to survive, or even GOOG money

I was under the impression that because of the recent socket change of the Opterons, that AMD did not want to releases a new socket right away with the Barcelonas. They had decided to wait until they were ready to transition to DDR3, which would require a new socket anyway, to break out all 4 HT links. This was originally suppose to occur late this year but was moved to early next year and I think it was moved again to late next year. What would come quicker is chipsets that support HT3 as there are none right now.

By-the-way these 4 HT links can be split into at least 2 links and allows 8 sockets to be directly linked with half the bandwidth. With HT3 each of these links would still be faster than HT1. So the trade-off is between hops and bandwidth. This had me very interested in 8-socket designs for the Barcelonas. 

Another point is where are the chipsets that support HT3 for the Barcelonas? I have not heard of any and this could be the real meat of your article.

Sorry for the flame ;)

Wayne: You mean SUN (the creator of Java), as in the article.

So are these OEMs going to make this information known to its customers that they sacrificed performace for their own selfishness or is this going to just translate into Intel Fanboys saying that Barcelona is not so good without knowing the fact it could have been much better if OEMs decided to use its full potential