Computex 2007: AMD's Barcelona and Other Products
by Gary Key on June 11, 2007 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Barcelona Clock Speed and Release Schedule
The CPUs themselves work, once again, as we've seen from AMD's own demos. But the real question we've been asking has been "at what clock speed?" The chips we saw at Computex ran at either 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz, the latter being the latest B01 stepping. AMD's Tier-1 server partners are starting to see 1.8GHz chips, but that's the fastest we've heard of at this point. We understand from the motherboard partners that AMD should hit 2.0GHz by September for the Barcelona launch, but according to AMD the partners will see at least 2.3GHz by the end of summer.
None of the partners we talked to are really impressed with Barcelona yet, but then again none of the true potential of the chip and chipsets have been realized due to CPU stepping issues, BIOS maturity, and generally low clock speeds. AMD simply hasn't gotten the process under control yet and after hearing our friends at the motherboard companies talk, AMD is close to near/total panic mode right now as the Q3 Barcelona product launch schedule rapidly approaches.
The general consensus is that until AMD gets to at least 2.0 - 2.3GHz, we will not see any significant volumes of Barcelona chips in the channel. Alternatively, AMD may delay the actual launch until September, with true volumes hitting the channel and partners by November. If this worst case scenario pans out, we're hearing that Agena would be pushed out to Q1 '08, or a slightly better option being a small trickle of Agena into the channel by December to keep AMD's Christmas promise.
Continuing on the worst case scenario track, some partners don't expect to see 2.3 - 2.6GHz Barcelona parts in volume until Q2 next year, and based on AMD's simulations the processor doesn't come "alive" until it hits the 2.6GHz mark. At the same time, others have said that an earlier stepping of the core was overclocked from 1.8GHz to 2.5GHz without too much trouble. All in all it's tough to say what clock speeds will be possible and when, but we do know for a fact that what we saw at Computex (Barcelona) ran slower than 2.0GHz.
One interesting rumor that we heard on the plane back home is that Agena parts are likely to scale to higher speeds quicker than Barcelona. The reason for this is getting the server oriented Barcelona to work reliably in 2P or above configurations is a leading factor in the reduced core speeds expected at launch. According to our sources, AMD seems very confident at this point that a 2.6GHz Agena part is likely when this processor series launches on the desktop. Of course, the question being just when is AMD planning the launch of Agena. We expect the product to be introduced publicly in the October time frame but actual availability dates and volumes is anyone's guess at this point.
The biggest story in all of this is that AMD is just not ready yet, the chips are not scaling well, and today it's looking like Intel may eat their lunch the rest of this year. AMD seems very optimistic with internal roadmaps showing 2.9GHz cores by Q1 2008, but everything we've seen or heard today makes this seem unlikely. However, as the original Athlon64 launch showed, AMD is certainly capable of surprising us and we certainly hope they do. For all of us who have been crying for Barcelona benchmarks, you really don't want to see them yet. Performance will improve quickly over time, but it's just not there today.
The CPUs themselves work, once again, as we've seen from AMD's own demos. But the real question we've been asking has been "at what clock speed?" The chips we saw at Computex ran at either 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz, the latter being the latest B01 stepping. AMD's Tier-1 server partners are starting to see 1.8GHz chips, but that's the fastest we've heard of at this point. We understand from the motherboard partners that AMD should hit 2.0GHz by September for the Barcelona launch, but according to AMD the partners will see at least 2.3GHz by the end of summer.
None of the partners we talked to are really impressed with Barcelona yet, but then again none of the true potential of the chip and chipsets have been realized due to CPU stepping issues, BIOS maturity, and generally low clock speeds. AMD simply hasn't gotten the process under control yet and after hearing our friends at the motherboard companies talk, AMD is close to near/total panic mode right now as the Q3 Barcelona product launch schedule rapidly approaches.
The general consensus is that until AMD gets to at least 2.0 - 2.3GHz, we will not see any significant volumes of Barcelona chips in the channel. Alternatively, AMD may delay the actual launch until September, with true volumes hitting the channel and partners by November. If this worst case scenario pans out, we're hearing that Agena would be pushed out to Q1 '08, or a slightly better option being a small trickle of Agena into the channel by December to keep AMD's Christmas promise.
Continuing on the worst case scenario track, some partners don't expect to see 2.3 - 2.6GHz Barcelona parts in volume until Q2 next year, and based on AMD's simulations the processor doesn't come "alive" until it hits the 2.6GHz mark. At the same time, others have said that an earlier stepping of the core was overclocked from 1.8GHz to 2.5GHz without too much trouble. All in all it's tough to say what clock speeds will be possible and when, but we do know for a fact that what we saw at Computex (Barcelona) ran slower than 2.0GHz.
One interesting rumor that we heard on the plane back home is that Agena parts are likely to scale to higher speeds quicker than Barcelona. The reason for this is getting the server oriented Barcelona to work reliably in 2P or above configurations is a leading factor in the reduced core speeds expected at launch. According to our sources, AMD seems very confident at this point that a 2.6GHz Agena part is likely when this processor series launches on the desktop. Of course, the question being just when is AMD planning the launch of Agena. We expect the product to be introduced publicly in the October time frame but actual availability dates and volumes is anyone's guess at this point.
The biggest story in all of this is that AMD is just not ready yet, the chips are not scaling well, and today it's looking like Intel may eat their lunch the rest of this year. AMD seems very optimistic with internal roadmaps showing 2.9GHz cores by Q1 2008, but everything we've seen or heard today makes this seem unlikely. However, as the original Athlon64 launch showed, AMD is certainly capable of surprising us and we certainly hope they do. For all of us who have been crying for Barcelona benchmarks, you really don't want to see them yet. Performance will improve quickly over time, but it's just not there today.
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JackPack - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
Employee morale at AMD must be pretty much low at this point.Every time an AMD spokesperson has to say "Barcelona is on track for a summer launch" or "regaining the performance lead this year" when they don't believe it themselves, it takes a toll on the employees.
It reminds me of what one AMD spokesperson said in July 2006, right after Intel's Woodcrest launch: "We remain supremely confident in both our product architecture and road map, which remains unchanged."
Why don't they just come clean about it?
Roy2001 - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
This reminds me the Iraq officer who claimed Iraq troops were defeating US troops when US army's tanks entered Bagdad.OddTSi - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
Maybe AMD should hire good ol' Baghdad Bob. At least he'll give us all a few good laughs.shabby - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
Dear stock holders, our product sucks and will probably be delayed.Do you really expect a company to say this?
TA152H - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
Barcelona having problems is so predictable it was almost a certainty. AMD doesn't have a great reputation for manufacturing, and currently their fastest parts are still 90nm, not the 65 nm lithography the Barcelona is made on. Since their well understood Athlon 64 can't reach high clock speeds on this process, naturally a newer design that is not well understood will be even worse. On top of this, AMD made a typical marketing mistake and made the Barcelona a native quad-core, something even Intel with much better manufacturing ability thought was currently too difficult. So, Barcelona running at 1.8 GHz is not terribly surprising considering everything. It doesn't mean, at all, that a dual core would be suffering from that clock speed either. There was a reason why Intel wouldn't do it yet, but of course AMD knew better. Hector has to go!I don't know why anyone at AMD would panic, except for the fact they have realized Intel was right about not rushing to native quad core. On the plus side, if they created a new socket, a dual-core version of the Barcelona would be a much better 8-socket than the Opteron, which was horrible after four sockets. So, if they have to eat crow and release slow quad-cores, at least the 8-way performance will be really good and might save them.
The performance of this processor is something else no one needs to worry about. I still think they are making a mistake splitting the integer and floating point clusters; it's a waste of resources and not many people care about x87 anyway. But the Barcelona has non-speculative memory reordering, whereas the K8 was incredibly primitive and memory access were all issued in-order. It's not up to the Core 2 standard, but it's equivalent to the Pentium Pro - Pentium III now in that regard, and that alone should make a nice improvement. With all the other improvements involved, I don't think anyone needs to worry about the IPC much.
The only thing I would worry about is the native quad core stuff. I don't know if AMD will tackle that easily, because Intel decided it was too difficult. But, for the dual core desktop processors, I can't imagine any serious long term problems. Maybe a delay while they find the critical paths and improve their manufacturing technology, but panicking just seems extreme to me. The IPC will surely not be anything anyone needs to worry about. It may not be quite as good as a Core 2 in certain workloads, but it will certainly be a great improvement on the K8 and will narrow the gap in the worst case, and possibly pass it in others. Certainly as you add sockets, it should do considerably better. And even on single sockets, you'll have a great advantage in IGP solutions since the processor can now sleep and use a lot less power.
I wouldn't worry too much if I were an AMD stockholder. I don't think there's anything too surprising, and nothing insurmountable, although native quad-core might not be feasible in the relatively short term and might compare unfavorably to Intel's solution. But, it's not a huge market yet anyway.
LTG - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
Are you kidding? There is a huge market for quad core servers and it's where the profit is.
AMD will remain under huge price pressure until 08 if this article is even close to true.
Not good, not good at all.
neweggster - Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - link
No way is Quad core server market as strong as you think. The problem here is that many many server specialists seek out alot more then just small real world performance upgrades. The research and product bids go towards many factors such as power management, performance equations to stability and so on. Meaning Quad core server market will hardly be pulled on hard enough till performance and other things are well enough to make such huge costly changes. Server people tend to stay with what works and for years at a time, wasting money on new products that aren't proven to offer huge benefits just yet makes it a worthless business transaction.TA152H - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
Actually, there isn't. There haven't even been quad cores out for very long, and it takes a while for server folks to move over to new technology like this is. The big advantage AMD has is they don't even need quad cores, and they are better off with 4 x duals instead of 2 x Qs. Intel with their FSB scale much more poorly to four sockets, and it wouldn't buy anything. AMD would presumably have a better solution with four sockets and dual cores than two sockets and quad cores since you'd increase memory bandwidth, unlike Intel's solution.Naturally, Quad by four sockets would be better, but that's comparing AMD with AMD. I'm sure they'll release something for that anyway, and if it runs a little slower in clock speed until they fix things, it's not a big deal because Intel really has nothing in that market worth a damn. AMD may run at slower clock speeds, but Intel's entire system architecture is horrid for it. So, I wouldn't call the 16 processor area a disadvantage for AMD at all. As I said, the eight processor arena should also be fine for AMD, just it will probably have four sockets instead of Intel's two. Again, their system architecture gives them a big advantage in having eight cores on four sockets, whereas Intel's doesn't so it doesn't make much sense for them. Case in point, AMD's 4 x 4 or whatever stupid name they have.
Also keep in mid that people that buy servers like to think ahead, and in a general sense you'd prefer your servers to be as similar as possible. I really like Intel solutions because their chipsets and motherboards are excellent quality, and I don't like to buy AMD anymore because I hate NVIDIA chipsets, and I don't trust ATI yet (they always seem late, slow and lacking features), but AMD's system architecture is so much better for four socket solutions, I can't see buying Intel now or in the near future. A lot of people buying servers, or planning to (as is most often the case) may look at see the Barcelona is a little slow right now, but Intel's solution is slow for quite some time; AMD should solve their clock speed problem well before Intel solves their system architecture problem.
I don't think this is a big deal. I think it's a big deal only in the sense that it seems that nothing AMD can do right now works, and everything gets blown out of proportion because it's always gloom and doom with this company. It's a real concern, of course, when a company has nothing but bad news, but I don't think this particular problem is really huge like it might initially seem. The constant problems though, when added up, surely do present a pretty bleak picture. But it wasn't that long ago Intel was making mistake after mistake. The difference is, everyone knew Intel would come out of it because they have so much talent and ability, but AMD is much smaller, so it's a bit scarier. But, remember, they have IBM on their side with manufacturing, and that should help.
CyberHawk - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
True!But, with all said, and all the unofficial benchmarks out there I also expected some real numbers. Looks like we'll have to wait a little longer.
With AMD pricing right now we do not have to worry. I hope that it turns out well, it is not a no-go situation.
Gary Key - Monday, June 11, 2007 - link
We tried/completed close to 30 benchmarks on an early 2P system but the results just were not good but this was based on a very early BIOS release. While we wanted to print real benchmarks, the numbers would not have meant anything considering the early BIOS issues. Hopefully, over the course of the next couple of weeks we should see tremendous progress being made in the BIOS tuning efforts.
The limited demos that AMD's partners showed during Computex were on a 1P system also, we had the same results with two benchmarks that ran without issue but felt like since Barcelona is destined for the server market that 2P results would have been more meaningful. What was more telling than our early benchmarks was just the fact that the platform is not ready yet. A fact that really floored us considering all of the press information about AMD being on schedule. While we feel confident that AMD could meet a limited (as in very limited) late July roll out of Barcelona, until core speeds improve, we do not see this as being beneficial except from a PR viewpoint. However, maybe that is what AMD really needs at this point until volume shipments are occurring. :)