Barcelona still missing in action

I love AMD for stimulating competition in microprocessors (otherwise we'd be stuck running liquid cooled 400w Pentiums) but it certainly looks like the game is up. Another massive loss in Q4 and I doubt all the private equity in the world would be enough to help AMD to catch up again, for AMD to overtake Intel with an architecture and a processes gap this wide is difficult to imagine. Hopefully someone can show me why I am wrong.

Newegg has had them in stock (although they are out right now). Thinkmate has a build time of 10-12 days for a workstation or server with a Barcelona. So it appears they are not completely missing.

AMD can kiss my sweet behind. They fuggered up so bad they ought to burn in corporate hell. There has been no NEW product from AMD for 2 YEARS!

AMD fanbois warning: don't even try to tell me that an Athlon-FX labeled as a 'black box edition' is something new, and I don't give a rat's about their need to adjust after swallowing ATI.

I'm going to be using Intel for the next three years at least because of this fiasco called DAAMIT, and I'm not alone.

If there even is and AMD in 2010, maybe they'll have something to talk about then.

For someone who remembers being spoon fed overpriced 386/486 processors from Intel--I sincerely hope AMD hangs in there. Based on some of the other comments, it's obvious that there are some who don't remember those days ...

Guess that makes me a AMD fanboi ;-)

AMD isn't going to go belly-up. You know who's going to save them? The people who don't know enough to explain the difference between an AMD chip and a potato chip.

There are plenty of people out there who don't give a damn about the latest and greatest, but want a computer. It doesn't take a lot of power to use Bit Torrent to download porn, or balance your checkbook, or email granny, or whatever.

Keep buying Intel, AMD isn't dead, they're just second fiddle.

Sell these processors multiplier unlocked. Won't matter to server customers but would certainly get the attention of the enthusiast crowd.

I hope AMD exisist in 2010. If not then its "back to the early 90" when Intel was "suffering" lack of competitors.

Oh, the pricing and architecture evolving was quite diffrent in those days ..


Somebody at AMD must go.

Just like Stan O'Neal at Merrill you have one badly hit quarter and already the board and investors call for a new chairman and CEO.

How many quarters of losses AMD had and will have?

Instead of admitting failure, they trumpet their 'performance per watt' thing and say that they still have the industry lead. The truth is, as many tests have reviewed, their lead over Intel is minimal at best, if at all.

They beat Intel few years ago on the race for clock speed with Athlon. Intel responds with P4 but the power envelop went through the roof. AMD beat Intel again on IPC / Power/ Mem bandwidth with Athlon 64. Now Intel responds with Core 2 Duo and take back the IPC / Power title. Now AMD's only technological advantage is the memory controller. They can mock Nehalem for using technology they've been using for years. They have until end of next year.

Every time Intel got beaten it doesn't lose its lesson. What AMD did was to expose Intel's weaknesses but doesn't have the momentum to deal a fatal blow and build critical mass. Now Intel won't lose the clock speed battle with their die technology that is 6 months ahead, nor make radical architectural changes like the P4. They now have products that deliver raw power or high performance per watt depending on demand. They have a roadmap in place that looks rock solid.

From then on it's only a matter of who has the financial prowess to go the distance which Intel has plenty.

Who knows they might come up with other technological advances in the future, GPGPU or Fusion or whatever and gain back market share but I don't see that happening in the short term.

Coming up with fancy names like Bulldozer and other empty promises isn't the solution. They look like a bunch of geeks trying to beat each other to the highest overclock and the highest 3DMark.

In any case the stakeholders are the losers.

You have been able to buy them at Newegg for ever now.....

My second tier vendor said they couldn't get the 2.0GHz quad core 8000 Opteron or the 1.9GHz low power part, but the 1.9GHz was available. For our application the difference between 1.9GHz and 2.0GHz was negligible anyway.

I guess everyone is quick to forget that AMD has been in 2nd place before. Lets go back to the Pentium 1 days. 

AMD was playing catchup. Intel had the Pentium 60, 66, 75, 100. AMD was still using the 486 architecture. In fact they continued to run the DX4-75, DX4-100, and DX4-133 when Intel was switching from Socket 3 to Socket 7. Then AMD brought out the K5, which was still slower than the Pentium series.

Then AMD managed to get their K6 to market with MMX slightly before intel, however their FPU was still significantly less powerful than the Pentium chips.

Then Intel brought the P2-233, 266, and 300's to market which annihilated the K6 series. AMD brought out the K6-2 (w/3DNow!) and bumped up FSB speeds. FPU performance still sucked. But their Integer performance was getting better. Intel kept increasing the P2 speeds and FSB speeds with the 333, 350, 400, 450. AMD was so far behind it looked like their end.

Then came Intel with the P3-450, 500, 550. AMD followed the K6-2 with the short lived K6-3 400 and 450. Now their Integer performance was about on par with the P3 at the same speed, however FPU was still dismal.

Even when the Athlon finally came out, Intel was neck and neck performance wise to the 700MHz mark. Then AMD cutting the L2 cache speed killed much of the Athlon's performance for the 800, 850, 900, 950, and 1000 cpu's. It wasn't really until the Thunderbird+ cores that AMD started pulling ahead in performance. Thanks mostly to Intel going the way of the P4.

Thus AMD has always been fighting to make their mark in the market. Now however they are in a much better position than they ever have been in the past. I wouldn't count them out son.

Got a 2 socket machine running a couple 2346s right now. If you wanted some I am sure you could have them. I would recommend looking instead of ranting.

@Joe

Yeah, too bad people such as yourself keep supporting Intel so they can go and make failures every couple of months. VIIV is the latest in a long line of failures from Intel. AMD definitely can't afford to waste money on ridiculous ideas. Therefore, Intel is not necessarily a good choice, especially due to the fact that they can afford to make a product that fails. 

Itanic, anyone? Or how about BTX? That was definitely going to replace ATX, because Intel designed it. Lets not forget, Prescott, what a great design that was. It had some good side uses too: home heating appliance and hot plate for cooking.

Wow. Lets send AMD to the grave as fast as possible so that Intel can bring these great contributions to computing back from the dead, clock them back down to Pentium Pro speeds and tell us that that is the pinnacle of human developed computers for the next decade or two, that they cannot break the 1ghz barrier anytime soon and we should be happy that they only consume 450watts instead of 700.
Intel FTW!

"There has been no NEW product from AMD for 2 YEARS!"
For Intel is a new product in last 5 YEARS.From pentium 3 , and the release of ATHLON, Intel was behind AMD. Remember the 386 time. The history is repeating.

Well its worrisome but AMD have a chance with the mid range, if they can compete on price and get market share.

One way they might be doing that with PCs is to create integrated system in a chip that uses chipset, cpu, gpu integration to provide better bang for buck and allow them to increase revenue per box / mobile device ie not share with nVidia or intel. That could help if they can make it perform and pay for them and their customers. 

I think the problem we are seeing here is the old "vaulting ambition o'erleaps itself" scenario. As a previous Inq article so rightly pointed out they have aimed idealistically for true quad core and neglected spliced quad, which vulpine Intel compromise bit them in the ass and I think their other projects were also too much of a leap, causing them to miss their footing in the present market and gamble on making it big in the future. Its gotta hurt and cant be considered a clever way to move forwards. They have no choice but to see it through as best they can but whoever was responsible for that oversight is not fit to rule AMD IMHO.

2c

Maybe AMD will get enough money out of their lawsuit against Intel to catch up. P-poor way to make money though.

seems like AMD is trying to focus on graphics hoping that Christmas is just for graphics upgrade,

2008 Q1 looks better with Phenom, anyway, here is Malaysia, seems that Socket F is very rare

Smart investors in the past have bought AMD stock just at moments like this one.

Have I bought it yet? No. But every cycle, this happens. Will history repeat itself? You never know. But it has many many times before, and if it does, the people who bought in when things were at their worst will end up looking very smart, again.

this my preferred cpu type has a familiar sound to it, remember commodore, then amiga , then r.i.p amd. hope not
long time gone and no return.

AMD's Barcelona is a monumental achievement. What people don't know yet is that AMD has been facing uphill battles on chemistry. Intel has a much bigger operating budget and have solved problems and gone past these problems with changes in transistors. When Opteron first came out I was working at AMD. I knew that AMD had some amazing firsts such as Hypertransport and 4 processor motherboards which actually baked off intels 4 proc motherboards. Yes, Intel got a little behind in the multiprocessor area but they more than made up for that with multicore releases. 

Penryn will now employ DDR3, a version of Hypertransport and go away from the unified memeory field. So this says AMD was doing things right. For Intel to become a follower means that AMD demonstrated a direction which Intel realized was the way of the future. Penryn now goes back in time to use a metal insulated gate process that was first used in the early 60's. This newly tuned process decreases leakage currents by a factor of 10. Tom's Hardware says that they have a sample they clocked to 4 Ghz. This is where AMD could be blown of the runway. 

Bottom line.. The new quad core Barcelona offers mind blowning performance. Barcelona will have its day in the sun and that day will show that Barcelona will be king of the hill by a 25-30% performance lead with a lower clock. As far as executed instructions per clock cycle goes AMD is King Kong. 

Penryn will clobber Barcelona and if AMD is able to move to 45 nm and come up with a more energy efficient process they will take back the crown. 

The good news is that AMD is still here. If AMD was not here Intel would still be selling pentiums...

Actually at my company, we are looking for high-performance compute machines, and I recently completed an eval of a 2xBarcelona server vs xeon 7350 quadcores. As jacked up as I was for the Barcy to do well, the Xeon box spanked it :-(

What I'd really want is mix and match. Four chips :- a 3.2Ghz plus single core(with lots of cache) for running all those boring single thread apps fast AND 3 x quad core chips at 1.5 GHz for encoding and compiling.

I'm content with my X2 for the moment. You see I'm a normal person. I don't put fluorescent lights in my pc, I don't spend hours per day on the internet being a processor fanboi, I don't waste $200 on exotic cooling solutions to overclock when I could have just spent $100 on the faster processor, and I don't use 3L33T RaD K00L text in my messages.
I can wait for Phenom, I don't want to reward intel for its predatory business practices and for their intentional hamstringing of some of their processor lines to keep them in certain "market segments". Haven't we all learned the harsh lesson of the Celeron?

Dirk Meyer recently said to expect a volume ramp of Barcelona in mid quarter, with products running up to 2.5 GHz. That would put it sometime in November. We'll see if they can pull it off. They have had some trouble with the Barcelona design and not the 65 nm process, according to Dirk.