Official AMD Barcelona Thread

[madcho]

nice

[nemrod]

This is "May 16, 2007"... "the nondisclosures on which lift this month"...
It's a joke... There is no "hint as of when NDA on Barcelona will be lifted!"

[Clairvoyant129]

Hint as of when NDA on Barcelona will be lifted!



Source

...

Did you look at the date of the article? May 16, 2007.

So far, all AMD showed was how pathetic K10's FP performance improved over K8.

[awdrifter]

This is kind of a continued discussion from this thread.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=147675

But man, if that article is true, then we (desktop users) won't see K10 until next year. Hopefully AMD can survive this with the revenue from the ATi chipset and video card sales.

[nemrod]

Perkam closes this thread:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=147675

It's been discussed at length and I'm not a fan of recycled news.

CLOSED

Perkam"

But if the first post was biased, the new article from Anandtech is interesting:

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3006

Obviously, there is still same kind of information about AMD not fully ready but there is too informations like

We know that Barcelona works and runs benchmarks, as we saw back at AMD in May. But the demos that AMD ran were on its own motherboards, not on motherboards from its partners. AMD's partners just recently received their first Barcelona samples, and as expected, the boards require some heavy BIOS work before the new chips will even work.

The motherboard we tested on had minimal HT functionality and wouldn't run at memory speeds faster than DDR2-667; most video cards wouldn't even work in the motherboard. Memory performance was just atrocious on the system, but the motherboard manufacturer we were working with attributed this to a BIOS issue that it expects to be fixed in the very near future.

And this could a little bit invalidate the "quick and dirty benchmarks" result on cinebench.

On an other hand, this give some questions about the "simply plug in AM2..."

[hawkeyefan]

On an other hand, this give some questions about the "simply plug in AM2..."

Yeah but if it's just BIOS problems, that is no surprise right? I guess I assumed that AM2+ boards would still need BIOS update to run the new CPUs.

[nn_step]

Big surprise a New CPU class requires new Bios..

[nemrod]

Big surprise a New CPU class requires new Bios..

The surprise is that apparently nobody was able to do a correct bios for those buggy devices... Memory issue? Is it really simply a bios problem? Where is the controler in the bios perhaps? Where are the bench on the AMD itself motherboard? A yes 4000 for the barcelona with 16 core when 8 K8 do 2000 and 8 core 2 do 5000... Play with that...

[awdrifter]

If it's a backward compatibility issue, why doesn't AMD just skip AM2+ and go to AM3. Then the motherboards can be designed to meet the cpu's needs.

[red]

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/...spx?i=3006&p=5

Just in case anyone missed it, Anandtech..

Oh yeah, after scouring several computer shops in the greater Taipei area we happened to find a pair of Barcelona chips available. Okay, maybe we broke into an engineering lab and ran off in the middle of the night with them but hey, nobody caught us. (Ed: and you thought all that time playing Ghost Recon was useless....) Once we get proper motherboard/BIOS support, we'll be ready to actually discuss performance.

[kunatz]

If it's a backward compatibility issue, why doesn't AMD just skip AM2+ and go to AM3.

I think AMD's very wise not to switch to DDR3 that soon.
Wanna have AM2+ and a pair of DDR2 Rams!

Did you read about the new B2 Stepping? Think I heard that whole BS already about B0, but even fudzilla seems to become more pessimistic (or realistic?).

[Sumanji]

If it's a backward compatibility issue, why doesn't AMD just skip AM2+ and go to AM3.

Because the "drop in upgrade" thing is a big marketing point for their server clients... and this is where they make the big bucks

[G3XC]

A secret revision

Our sources have confirmed that a few Barcelona chips that the company demonstrated at Computex behind the closed doors are B0 revision.

We also learned that B0 can go faster than 1.6 GHz but that it was a very buggy revision. Now our sources are talking about B2 revision that is suppose to save the day and this one is expected any day now.

The same people also indicated that Barcelona will either be the best thing that even happened to AMD or it will be doomed to be the next Netburst. Unfortunately it looks more like the later one, at least from this perspective.

Source

[awdrifter]

Because the "drop in upgrade" thing is a big marketing point for their server clients... and this is where they make the big bucks

But that just meant it has to be compatible with socket F right? Not necessarily AM2.

[Dresdenboy]

well one would assume after 3 years and one of the worlds best design teams, they would be able to improve performance atleast slightly

I think, the problem is the branch prediction, which didn't improve that much compared to other parts of the CPU. I measured 15% mispredicted branches for the povray benchmark on my X2. Standard code usually has ~5%. Then there is a branch about every 8 instructions. That's normal for a raytracer, which has to do a few calculations to find out, what to do next.

MSVC 8 also wasn't able to vectorize any calculations. So there are practically no 128 bit SSE instructions, which could make use of K10's improved FPU.

According to Prime95 benchmark, Willamette was much faster than Athlon and Northwood faster by 30% or more than Athlon 64.

[Cooper]

But that just meant it has to be compatible with socket F right? Not necessarily AM2.

All K10 chips will be compatible with current desktop/server platforms.

[red]

With just a BIOS update. Same thing for Penryn, though with Penryn, according to some, only to recognize the chip. According to Anandtech, current AMD boards require heavy tweaking to work. Why would mobo makers be inclined to heavily tweak their old stuff for Barcelona but not just update for Penryn?

[informal]

red, "heavy bios patches" that you mention are needed since mobo manufacturers got ES not retail CPUs and these are not representatives of final K10 performance.They are there to help them write correct microcodes.And these early samples need bios patches to work correctly.Those are the ones Anand "obtained".And i'm sure Anand will write an "article" about them as soon as he gets mobo and working BIOS for the eng. samples.Only problem will be that these won't be near final scores we will see from K10 once it ships.

[red]

You are implying that Anandtech benches will rush out ala DailyTech. I don't think so. He already warned us of bad initial results meaning that current stuff works, just really badly and seems to want to do whatever to have the best results as possible. It is very fun to champion Anandtech as AMD fudder, very fashionable, please tell me what is fud about informing us?

FLG, and some other guys are talking about ES/not retail Penryn (I assume) requiring simple BIOS updates and I don't get any sense of "heavy BIOS tweaking", only tweak for recognition. So question to you, do you think mobo makers be more inclined to pity current AM2 users and make BIOS updates for K10 and lose sales on K10 mobos to appease AMD's previous promises, more so than they will for Penryn?

[Cooper]

red

All current AM2/SocketF platforms are compatible with K10 with just BIOS update. And performance of Barcelona is really good compared to quad-core Xeon clock for clock.

[Shintai]

red

All current AM2/SocketF platforms are compatible with K10 with just BIOS update. And performance of Barcelona is really good compared to quad-core Xeon clock for clock.

There is still a chance a motherboard or more that wont be compatible. Remember the VIA chipset and X2s? I was one of those owners

Can you elaborate on the performance part?

[adamsleath]

still sounds like ages b4 we see anything in the shops
is phenom gonna be b4, after, or simultaneous release with penryn..any thoughts?

any advance on christmas '07 /Q1 '08?

one article i just read said DDR3 would be available in more quantity at Q407/Q108 time.


still leaves almost 6 months for AMD to sort out their steppings/microcode/whatever they are doing

[Cooper]

There is still a chance a motherboard or more that wont be compatible. Remember the VIA chipset and X2s? I was one of those owners

Can you elaborate on the performance part?

Nothing drastic should happen.

Sorry I cant share more info.

[nn_step]

There is still a chance a motherboard or more that wont be compatible. Remember the VIA chipset and X2s? I was one of those owners

Can you elaborate on the performance part?

What problem are you speaking of?
I have Via Mobos and they work just fine with Dual core Procs

[Shintai]

What problem are you speaking of?
I have Via Mobos and they work just fine with Dual core Procs

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset...603042038.html

K8T890 dont.