Barcelona

Don't smoke the Penryn pipe!

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Contrary to all the noise being generated by Intel about that die-shrink MCM known as 'Penryn', I am convinced that waiting for Barcelona is still the best bet for enterprises wanting to upgrade their server hardware this year.

Since Barcelona follows the usual AMD dev strategy, it will have the usual lead in scalability, and flexibility, power and thermal displacement that we have come to expect from Opteron. Furthermore, it will have cooling intelligence built into the CPU.

The only reason Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Extreme is being mentioned now is because Santa Clara was able to bring its economics of scale to bear on manufacturing to produce the MCM that is Core Extreme/Penryn.

As for all that talk about Nehalem.

What Nehalem?

In 2008?

I have no doubt that when Barcelona drops, all talk of Nehalem would evaporate, as its performance would send poor Nehalem back to the drawing board, a la Pentium 5 and Itanic.

While I shall be poring through recently-acquired information, press releases, published information, and rumors/facts in the blogosphere over the next few days, be rest assured I will have more on this next week.

© 2007, John Obeto II for SmallBizVista.com®

© 2005-2009, John Obeto for SmallBizWindows

Intel CEO: We'll wait for Vista SP1

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That has got to be the most stupid statement coming from the piehole of a Fortune 500 CEO for a long while!

Also, from Intel?

For a company which is supposed to be this great company, now you know why they stumbled that greatly and for so long, Dell notwithstanding.

Wait for Vista SP1?

Still a lot of media ho's carried the news, treating is a some sort of validation of their position.

I'm afraid not only is the point missed, but the stupidity of Otellini's statement is missed as well.

Is this the way you treat your best software partner? Does this yum-yum think that the 4% Linux, and 3% OS X market share can take him there? Forgot, AMD had the greater Linix market share as well.

Robert McLaws, of Windows-Now.com, skillfully dissects the Intel position in a rejoinder to Otellini's moronic statement, and provides the text of a memo from AMD Executive VP Henri Richard exhorting his troops to move to Vista post haste.

For goodness sakes, if Robert, myself, and several thousand other people could have had over 2 years to test Vista, where were the yobs at Intel whose CPUs were targeted by Vista as well?

Intel is waiting for Vista SP1?

I hate to tell Paulie this, but by that time, AMD would have released Barcelona. And if estimates are to be believed, and I don't see why not, what platform do you think would be hot during the Christmas/end-of-year buying season?

In the same vein, what company's products do you think I would be recommending to clients, family, and friends?

Certainly not the company whose boss does not have enough confidence it his own IT department's ability to support Vista today.

Can you say, AMD?

Here's looking at my next desktop, with a 2-socket Barcelona solution for a total of 8 cores come Q3 of 2K7!

© 2007, John Obeto II for SmallBizVista.com®

© 2005-2009, John Obeto for SmallBizWindows

AMD Barcelona and the 40% number.

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At a briefing at the Windows Vista™ RTM Labs in January, Pat Moorhead of AMD told us to expect great things from AMD, especially in the Quad-core space.

When pressed, he just had a sly smile and asked us to wait.

“Why”, we asked?

Great things are in the pipeline.

“Your 2-socket, quad-core offering is inelegant”, we said.

He reminded us of the fact that our buy-in into the 2-socket solution also ensures that our investment would be easily upgradeable to the forthcoming (Q2 2007) AMD single-socket chip, for a total of eight, yes, eight cores on a single motherboard, blogged about here.

When I tried to press him about whatever they would announce at the ISSCC, and also tried to goad him by talking up (rival) Intel’s currently shipping quad-core CPU, codenamed Cloverton, he did not take the bait.

However, Pat intimated that we would be impressed by the processor, even more so than we were used to from AMD.

Hmmmmm…….

At the 2007 International CES, which ran subsequent to the Vista RTM Lab, I tried to get someone lower down the foodchain (a booth droid) to divulge info to no avail.

Now we know why!

On Friday, January 26, AMD picked up the gauntlet Intel had thrown down, and gave Intel a boot-lickin' smackdown with it.

AMD is estimating that the next generation mainstream AMD chip, codename Barcelona, will show a performance boost over Cloverton of 40% during a normal load.

Are you kidding me?

40%?

How could they do that?

Well, documents revealed to me disclose the following two diagrams, the first about the architectural design of Barcelona, and the second about its design goals.

AMD Barcelona Architectural Design


AMD Barcelona Design Goals

From the graphic, you can see that the performance delta can run as high as 80% on certain applicarions, per core.

That, folks, is real smokin' performance!

If the rumors are true that Intel's Penryn part is just a 45nm MCM, and not a true native quad-core part, then AMD's Barcelona more and more becomes the yardstick for quad-core CPUs, just as Opteron was.

At SmallBizVista.com, we are looking forward to laying our grubby hands on this beauty very soon.

My report on AMD for the forthcoming replacement season will be released in the next two weeks.

© 2007, John Obeto II for SmallBizVista.com®

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© 2005-2009, John Obeto for SmallBizWindows