Monday, September 10, 2007

AMD's Barcelona not a savior, yet

Advanced Micro Devices' quad-core Opteron processor is finally ready, but it's far from clear that this is the product that will help right AMD's ship.


AMD CEO Hector Ruiz will formally unveil the quad-core Opteron chip, previously code-named Barcelona, during an event in San Francisco Monday evening. Over a year in the making, and six months later than expected, Barcelona will be AMD's first chip with four processing cores.


The four major server vendors all plan to use Barcelona in their servers, and AMD thinks it can court new customers. But it appears that Barcelona is far from the smash hit that the company once hoped it had with its "native" quad-core design.


Intel has had quad-core chips for servers since last November. The company chose an easier-to-implement method of putting four processing cores together by simply packaging two dual-core chips together. AMD took a different approach, integrating all four cores onto a single chip, with the belief that having all four cores together was a better fit for its architecture.



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