It always seems that the worse a company does, the more information it divulges. We saw this behavior with Intel at the end of the Pentium 4 era, and we're definitely seeing it now with AMD. Enjoy it while it lasts, because it sure makes the industry a lot more exciting to talk about.
Today's disclosures are many of the things we alluded to in our last article about AMD's future, what we called The Road Ahead. If you were waiting for us to fill in the blanks, this article will do just that.
Barcelona is the second CPU to plug into what AMD is calling its 2nd generation Opteron platform, it will have one more socket-compatible successor before the platform is retired:
The first Barcelona processors available will be the HE (Energy Efficient) and standard performance CPUs, running at speeds of 2.0GHz or lower at launch:
In Q4 of this year AMD will introduce the SE (High Performance) Barcelona parts, running at 2.3GHz and above.
AMD is doing its best to sugar coat the low clock speed launch by saying that it's addressing the majority of the market at these clocks, but the fact of the matter is that AMD would be singing a different tune if it was able to achieve higher clock speeds at launch.
Today's disclosures are many of the things we alluded to in our last article about AMD's future, what we called The Road Ahead. If you were waiting for us to fill in the blanks, this article will do just that.
Barcelona Update
Before getting into the new stuff, AMD gave us a brief update on Barcelona, whose launch is now hopefully less than a month away.Barcelona is the second CPU to plug into what AMD is calling its 2nd generation Opteron platform, it will have one more socket-compatible successor before the platform is retired:
The first Barcelona processors available will be the HE (Energy Efficient) and standard performance CPUs, running at speeds of 2.0GHz or lower at launch:
In Q4 of this year AMD will introduce the SE (High Performance) Barcelona parts, running at 2.3GHz and above.
AMD is doing its best to sugar coat the low clock speed launch by saying that it's addressing the majority of the market at these clocks, but the fact of the matter is that AMD would be singing a different tune if it was able to achieve higher clock speeds at launch.
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kilkennycat - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
Highly likely that nVidia will solve this problem at both high and low end with their next family of GPUs. Stay tuned for the end of 2007. The first part out of the chute is also likely not to be the highest end but that which replaces the 8800GTS at a price close to $200 with full HD hardware decode... nVidia is very well aware of the cost-performance hole left by both AMD/ATI and themselves in their current GPU line.strikeback03 - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
with that Phenom demo box, I think they have finally found use for a 1000W+ power supplySpoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
Given the size of the heatsink on the cpu, I'd venture power consumption is inline with other engineering samples, 120w or less max TDPSpoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
Oh my bad, you're right when taking the three 2900XTs in consideration.Where's my edit button :(
Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
At least 2 times in the article, the text builds up anticipation for a graph, but it never comes, the most telling example is on page 6, but one or two pages before it it happened also. Both graphs are supposed to be from Intel.Justin Case - Monday, August 13, 2007 - link
Exactly. They say "Two years ago Intel used the following chart to illustrate the need for multi-core CPUs", and then the image is an AMD slide, not an Intel graph.Omega215D - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
If they plan to integrate an on die PCIe controller on the CPU how would this affect overclocking?Regs - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
I'd imagine just like how it was when AMD intergrated the memory controller, mobo makers will just have to add more bios options.yacoub - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
While paging through the article, the thing that stood out most to me was the AMD graphic on page 5 supposedly demonstrating how much more performance Bulldozer is going to offer without a single number on the graph. I guess they want us to measure its performance increases in pixels. hehe :)LTG - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Anand you're really good at distilling out the bottom line from massive amounts of marketing talk and slide ware.