Quote Originally Posted by JohannesRS View Post
anyway...

it's interesting. Dave and S7 could give better info on this, but I THINK that there weren't so many issues in the transiton from single to dual core opterons, am I right?

That would lead to the conclusion that the problem with this is coming not exactly from the quad-core feature, but from the K10 plattaform itself. In terms of compability of bios, of course, but it's not the number of cores that is the issue.

And that last move would lead to one of the discussions I've read about the problems AMD got: it's worst mistake was to try to push at the same time 65nm, K10 and quad-core. Of course, they had no other option, specially when the initial project from K8Ls were down (if this rumour is true, of course). But it seems that the price of pushing everything at the very same time is still being paid...
While you make some valid points here, IMO, the issue isn't with the die shrink or additional cores. The problem seems to lie within Barcelona's new "power-saving" features. For example: the current bioses are incorrectly identifying P-states on these chips as well as underclocking the northbridges since dual power planes have yet to be implemented. It also didn't help that AMD had issues getting fully functional procs to the mobo makers due to poor initial yields. Realistically, I think we're about a month away from seeing Barcelona running smoothly on our current platforms