AMD expects Barcelona to be 40% faster than Clovertown!

[gOJDO]

"We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent," Allen said. The quad-core chip also will outperform AMD's current dual-core Opterons on "floating point" mathematical calculations by a factor of 3.6 at the same clock rate, he said.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6152645.html

AMD expects to ship Barcelona chips by the middle of this year. In a meeting with internetnews.com this week, AMD officials emphasized several key differentiators over the Intel (Quote) quad-core server chip, the Xeon 5300, or Clovertown.

First, the Barcelona chip is a native quad-core design, not two dual cores glued together like the Xeon 5300, AMD officials claim.

The memory controller for Barcelona is built into the chip and not external, like the front-side bus design Intel uses, leading AMD to claim greater performance because the chip's four cores are not getting bottlenecked going through one gateway.

Despite the big gain in performance over the previous generation, Barcelona will have the same power consumption levels, with 95- and 68-watt designs.

So even though the wattage hasn't gone down, the increase in processing power turns into a 60 percent-per-watt performance gain, according to Randy Allen, vice president of the server and workstation division at AMD.

Allen said there's an 80 percent scale over dual core processors; AMD's own benchmarks put it well ahead of the Xeon 5300 in terms of performance.

"We took their best punch with Clovertown and this is our response," he said.

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/3655636
AMD better be serious about these claims!
If this is true, then Barcelona is much more advanced then AMD previosly published.

IMO AMD is only making big smoke. Sooner or latter, we'll find out

[nn_step]

IMO AMD is only making big smoke. Sooner or latter, we'll find out

I believe the term you are searching for is IF.

[gOJDO]

Nope!
In my opinion AMD is only making a big smoke about Barcelona. Why?
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/...3-13816256.htm

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 24, 2007 (AFX International Focus) -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has scored some of its most dramatic victories against archrival Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC) over the past year with soaring sales of the high-margin server chips that help power corporate networks.

But AMD's (NYSE:AMD) stock price tumbled more than 4 percent Tuesday after the company said sales of those profitable processors flattened in the fourth quarter and suffered from 'significantly' lower selling prices because of a brutal price war with Intel.

AMD's stock fell 75 cents to $16.76 in after-hours trading after the company reported a net loss of $574 million, or $1.08 per share, for the quarter that ended Dec. 31. In the same quarter last year, AMD earned $96 million, or 21 cents per share.

Before the report was released, AMD shares dropped 2 cents to close Tuesday at $17.51 on the New York Stock Exchange.

So, what do you think?

[nn_step]

So, what do you think?

I think K8L isn't out yet, so I'll probably give it the benefit of a doubt.

[irev210]

which clovertown against which barcelona, etc.

there are too many unknowns for us to have any real idea at this point in time unless you work at AMD or Intel.

We should all be excited about both Intel and AMD, as they have brought foward innovation that we havent seen since the 90's.

[K404]

I think K8L has very little to do with whats happening now in terms of share price...to lie now will do more damage overall in the long term than good...of course share price will fall when price cuts are announced, and price cuts generally go hand in hand with less money coming in the door.

[HungryForHertz]

More happy in my pants speculation I hope it's true though, not just because I like AMD but because I like to see competition and the leadership in the processor performance charts switching hands (just means both companies work harder to develop new technology).
It's AMD's turn for the spotlight again.

[Dimitriman]

Hope the claims are true. I don't think its that realistic to compare it to clovertowns just yet as intel will probably release a faster model to compete with Barcelona when its released. But as long as there is a 60% performance/watt increase over its previous generation, I think we should all be pretty happy...

[K404]

heh heh we all know benchmarks and performance will be under uber NDA at the mo

[ozzimark]

AMD's word has been quite questionable lately.

really? AM2, they never said there was a big performance gain. there wasn't. they didn't really say much at all about revG... and it's slowly hitting the market with about as much commotion as amd made about it.

[informal]

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37154

Charlie is a rare INQ guy who can be trusted . I trust him on this.

Bring it on AMD! They have a New hammer in store and i can almost smell the smoke of hammered clowers and its shrank brothers .

Wafers in 'real soon'

By Charlie Demerjian: Wednesday 24 January 2007, 09:02
AMD WASN'T JOKING about Barcelona hitting Q2. I didn't believe it until a solid source came out and said the volume ramp is starting 'really soon'.

If really soon is defined as the end of the month, and you add in the 10-12 weeks it takes from shiny silicon pizzas in to pin laden chunks out, that would mean parts are available at the beginning of May.

It would not surprise me if it is trading yield out for time to market, so let's add a month before they are really available. That puts things at early June for volume, or when AMD said it would have it out. Minor miracles do happen. µ

[metro.cl]

important: "at same clock speed"

we dunno K8L clock speeds so we cant say much also in which apps is that huge perf increase?

[metro.cl]

ups sorry problem in database :S

[zakelwe]

May would be good because there is a chance of leaked ES samples around March-April then which is not too long to wait at all. I was thinking more Sept-October time frame.

I'm guessing a processor which does not overclock well but has large punch per pound, ie typical AMD. Will be interesting to see it against Yorkfield. LEts hope the price war continues.

Regards

Andy

[gOJDO]

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37154

Charlie is a rare INQ guy who can be trusted . I trust him on this.

Bring it on AMD! They have a New hammer in store and i can almost smell the smoke of hammered clowers and its shrank brothers .

Charlie thinks that K8L vs Penryn will be a clear win for Penryn! So do I.

[rozzyroz]

interesting, i cant wait for it to come out. however, they say in the article that barcelona is actually 1.8x the fp performance of an opteron, core to core. so when they say 3.6 x faster, its because there are 2 more cores.

A faster floating-point engine performs mathematical calculations--long an Opteron strong suit, though not as important a part of the chip as that for integer operations. At a given clock frequency, a Barcelona core outperforms a current Opteron core by a factor of 1.8. By going quad-core, a Barcelona chip overall will provide a boost factor of 3.6, Allen said.

Not all things are better, though. Specifically, Barcelona's clock frequency will be lower than that for the company's dual-core chips. That's a common situation because quad-core chips require more circuitry, and more circuitry means more power consumption and waste heat, unless the chips run slower.

i wonder if they mean its 40% faster clock for clock on some applications, or 40% faster then the fastest clovertown?

[de redhead]

I put off getting a dual core until the Core 2 Duo was released.

Once the Core 2 Duo was released I decided to wait until mainstream Quad Cores were released.

When I saw the announcement of price drops for Quad Cores in Q2 I decided to wait again.

Now that AMD has made these claims I have finally decided to once and for all wait until April to see the benchmark results of K8L ES. If the performance is clearly superior to Clovertown, I will go AMD. If it is not, I will go Dual Clovertown (hopefully with a mobo that is upgradable to Penryn) and AMD may have lost me as a customer for good.

[ChongL]

I'm in the same boat redhead...

[alucasa]

Too early to tell anything.

[Carfax]

Charlie thinks that K8L vs Penryn will be a clear win for Penryn! So do I.

Where did he say that?

It's not a bad assumption I guess. The K8L will probably be faster clock for clock compared to Penryn/Yorkshire, but because the latter will be clocked significantly higher, they will outperform the K8L.

[de redhead]

Where did he say that?

It's not a bad assumption I guess. The K8L will probably be faster clock for clock compared to Penryn/Yorkshire, but because the latter will be clocked significantly higher, they will outperform the K8L.

And be significantly more overclockable.

[gOJDO]

Where did he say that?

It's not a bad assumption I guess. The K8L will probably be faster clock for clock compared to Penryn/Yorkshire, but because the latter will be clocked significantly higher, they will outperform the K8L.

Give me your e-mail by PM. I'll forward our conversation.

[Kingcarcas]

I'm in the same boat alucasa...

[alucasa]

It doesn't matter what kind of conversation there was. Unless the "guy" actually has an ES chip and has compared with core 2 duo, it all becomes what I'd call "fanboyism".

What I want to see is real results, not some speculations.

[Drunner611]

Wow, this could be big for AMD, or a big let down for us speculators. I'll just forget I heard this and wait for the real deal to be tested here at XS.