- Thursday, 26 November 2009
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me - than a frontal lobotomy"
Barcelona appears in various different flavours
AND SO TODAY is Barcelona day. AMD has finally announced the broad availability of its quad-core server chip, some six months after it was officially launched and never have the fortunes of a company been so dependent on a single sliver of silicon.
"We're off to the races now, and the product is out," John Fruehe, worldwide market development manager at AMD appears to have told Dow Jones. "All of the fixes are in place, and everything looks wonderful," he said.
Barcelona's launch back in September 2007 acquired the aura of a farce when for months afterwards samples of the chip failed to appear. AMD identified numerous errata with its native quad core technology and wisely pulled the product rather than have its customers' servers fall over, which would have been even more catastrophic.
At the launch AMD salesman Alberto Macchi denied to the INQUIRER that the chip was six months late even then. A fact acknowledged by none other than Hector Ruiz just a few days later. AMD has barely spoken to us since.
AMD announces ten OEM validated platforms featuring the chip today. Top of its list of hopeful fellow travellers is HP which has been touting Barcelona-based systems for some time now.
Randy Allen hyped the partnership in a statement today. Allen, who is corporate vice president and general manager, of AMD's server and workstation division, said HP was continuing to "respond to customers who see the benefit in our unique Direct Connect Architecture with some of the industry’s most innovative designs."
Barcelona will be slipped into some HP Proliant G5 servers announced recently. Allen described them as a major leap forward and take advantage of the increased performance, energy efficiency and sophisticated virtualization and power management enabled by the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor.”
HP is offering eight Barcelona "platforms". There are a further ten out about in the channel. Allen said; "Channel partners uniformly display strong commitment to their customers’ business requirements and are among the first to deliver the technical innovation that Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors add to each of their distinctive product lines. ” µ
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So would it be true to say that most of these new Barcelona based solutions will be sitting on (using) NVIDIA chipsets?

So the Barcelona is going to pull AMD out of the mud, but won't it also bolster NVIDIA.

Why has AMD given up on building highend chipsets. Will the Barcelona be the new highend home HDTV decoder?
HDTV streaming is still a few years away yet, streaming has only just started to move to 700Kbps.
So, what market are they hitting at and where will they make the money?
[back to gaming?]
With Brain Big Enough to Fill WashTub, Barcelona is Completely New Breed. Hurray.

However, that Naughty Intel has Come Up to Starting Gate with something Barcelona just Might Need. Dual on Board Memory Controllers. For even Mo More Memroy.

Wouldn't be ill advised to write that Rev into DDR3 in upper limit of near 2 ghz, of course its still in Field Test Trial right NOW. So Hope & Pray, it might be: AMD Happy, Happy BirthDay...Bozo,Bozo,....
Thomas von Drashek
in the last paragraph

SM replies: Thanks Nobby... fixing 'em now.
This is still a farce as the availabilty of the B3 stepping chips is about zero. Try to buy a HP or Dell machine with a B3 and guess what? Lead times are 12 to 16 weeks on systems.... Talk to your sales rep and the plot thickens - it's not because of strong demand - it's because that is when AMD "says" they will deliver parts...demand is actually low as lead time are so long.

So while I am happy to see that B3 is fixed and performs well AMD is still not out of the woods. They have yet to be able to deliver parts in quantity at clock speeds people want and power consumption that is realisitc. Nobody is going to rush out to buy 2.1Ghz quad core B3's that are using 100W for top dollar.

Lets not mention the performance of Nehalem on our HPC code as that's under NDA, but it is very safe to state that the B3 is no match for what Intel has coming next so lets hope Shanghai isn't late, busted, or not available in quantity.

I think I remember hearing that name a few years ago. What was it again?
Isn't this joke late for April's fools
Comment by Alberto Machiato is again in line with the stupidity the chiefs on top are releasing on a nearly every day base...

1600 employees have to go, but what with the 100'of VP and useless directors burning cash at lightspeed ?

Do the math: director earns roughly +$300k base + variable cheese
VP touch down is arround $500k...

VP's today are arround 80 and directors...

But then again guess what kind of people will need to go...
AMD should not fight Intel head on. That's suicide. They have neither the resources nor the talent to do so.

What AMD needs to do is sit down and rethink its entire strategy. They have to make chips in ways that are needed but that Intel will not bother with. I don't know what those ways are but AMD needs to take an indirect approach if it wants to survive.
I love that, good news...did anyone benchmark a few of these 10 solutions?

I love horse races, especially the kind with horses, that run, and have a clever performance numbering scheme.
The Barcelona HAS an integrated dual memory controller.

Actually, it's the current Xeons that lack it.