"What, no Barcelona?"

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If there was ever any doubt that Intel made a bad decision not going true quad-core, it should be clear with numbers like these that their decision was sound and is paying off. Quad-core processors may not be faster in every situation, but in heavily threaded CPU intensive environments the extra CPU cores are easily able to make up for any penalties associated with the dual-die packaging.

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Their decision was sound from a business point of view. Native quad core is difficult, it costs a lot. AMD was months late to market with their quad core, most likely in part due to it.

Yet, with AMD's native quad core CPU already out, I fail to see why you say that Intel decision was the right one. Had you posted this article a month ago, yes I would have agreed that Intel's quad cores were running rings around AMD, and despite their higher power efficiency in some cases, Intel was winning over all, especially in higher loads. But now, the situation is different - AMD has their own native quad core, which in all likelihood is more energy efficient than the Intel. Thus, your conclusion isnt valid - Intel's choice was right at the time, because AMD could not compete, but now they can, and now its quad core vs quad core, and the fact that AMD's quad core is a single die gives it a small but significant advantage.

Why did you not benchmark the Barcelona chip? I'm aware its not really available in volume right now, but...

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Yet, with AMD's native quad core CPU already out, I fail to see why you say that Intel decision was the right one. Had you posted this article a month ago, yes I would have agreed that Intel's quad cores were running rings around AMD, and despite their higher power efficiency in some cases, Intel was winning over all, especially in higher loads. But now, the situation is different - AMD has their own native quad core, which in all likelihood is more energy efficient than the Intel. Thus, your conclusion isnt valid - Intel's choice was right at the time, because AMD could not compete, but now they can, and now its quad core vs quad core, and the fact that AMD's quad core is a single die gives it a small but significant advantage.

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That's not the point. The point is that Intel went with an MCM design and was therefore able to sell quads for almost a year before AMD could provide any competition. Intel made a good decision and just because AMD finally have something to compete with, doesn't make that decision go from good to bad in the blink of an eye. It almost seems as if you believe the tested Intel quad core is a new product. It's not, it's still the old Clovertown core, although it's based on the newer G stepping.

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I think thats exactly the point. yes Intel had the overrall performance lead for over a year with their Core 2 architecture.

And even now, they hold the top spot until Barcelona scales to higher clocks.

but, in a performance per watt race, they no longer hold the top spot because they no longer have the only quad core cpu.

Saying that Intel made the right decision in rushing a quad core to market is true. But it only holds true while AMD doesnt have its own quad core. When AMD does, it doesnt really matter who came first - it matters who offers better performance per watt.

Therefore, now that AMD has quad core chips out, it doesnt matter what Intel did to get theirs out first, it matters which is the best chip.. The Radeon X1950 has been out for longer than the 8800 GTS, does taht mean it is a better graphics card?

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AMD has had ample time to scale their processor to a winning choice. MCM was the smartest choice as Intel was bringing in money over the year as AMD showed no competition. Even though Barcelona is still coming (Don't act like it's here already.) AMD is still losing money.

Even AMD said themselves they wish they had come out with an MCM design with Intel. Unfortunately since they are behind on processor technology it wouldn't have been feasible.

Even you have said "small, but significant advantage" in other words an advantage that is way too late because they took the long route to revenue. With such a large die size, I can see that yields will still remain low til Intel comes out with definitive competitive beast in very high yields and wide avaiablity. So from a business point of view, AMD is failing. If AMD cannot cut Intels technology lead by half a year, we will continue to see this trend til there is no more AMD.



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Intel's manufacturing lead has been pretty much constant for a decade (if anything, the gap is slightly smaller now).

AMD has a much bigger market share today than they did in the K7 (and K6, etc.) days. Add the fact that AMD now has some of the best GPUs in the market, a lot of very important patents, an excellent team of engineers and deals with most top OEMs (all things they didn't have back then), and it's pretty obvious that news of AMD's death are greatly exaggerated.

The problem with AMD is they're trying to grow too fast. To sustain their current growth rate, they're going to have to start turning in a profit very soon (as in under 5 months), which is not very likely.

If AMD manages to ramp Barcelona to, say, 2.6 GHz in volume until the end of the year (which is not impossible; the issue is related to a respin, not progressive improvement), then the risks they've been taking probably will pay off. Otherwise they'll be forced to slow down and compete based on price, at least until Bulldozer is ready. Their latest GPUs are looking pretty good, too, so they might be able to get by on profits from the ATI division even if Barcelona takes longer to ramp (as I suspect it will).

In any case, this idea that some people seem to have that AMD is "ruined" and "about to disappear" is complete nonsense. They're in a much better position today than they were in 2002, and they didn't disappear in 2002, either.

P.S. - A dual-die (2+2) CPU would have been perfectly feasible (just slap a second core on the same package, connected by HT, and treat is as a RAM-less CPU one hop away), and AMD would have easily been able to release it before Intel. It was an executive decision not to do so, and one that I'm sure they regret. The market for quad-core CPUs is small but pretty lucrative. They were probably hoping to have Barcelona out ahead of schedule, and instead it got delayed (hardly something new, chez AMD). On the other hand, I'm sure they're glad they did not go with FB-DIMM (despite having licensed the patents and planned to support it with Barcelona).


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Intel having quad-core before AMD did give them the upper hand, because native quad-core as it turns out, only gave a small advantage to AMD. Although it doesn't seem like AMD is winning this race with barcelona, they need to stop their stubborness and accept the fact that MXM design is the way to go and start pumping out octa-cores before intel does. It's the only way amd can regain their crown. I mean the fact that native quad-core means low yields is already costing them millions, they need to accept the fact that MXM is a more efficient solution for making processors.

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sorry, I meant MCM.

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Barcelona is being shipped to OEMs and is not available to customers regardless of what AMD says. Are you suprised that there is no Barcelona Benchmarks? There hasn't been any for months and even weeks before the launch. AMD is the only one to blame for no 3rd party benchmarks as they don't offer press kits ahead of time for 3rd party testing. If they have, it's a rarity. For now it's back to the AMD slideshows.

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Since it appears that AMD made good on its work to deliver Barcelona chips that don't consume any more power than their dual-core Opteron counterparts, I'm thinking that Intel is either going to have to make some significant speed improvements with Harpertown or lower the power consumed by the platform somewhat to beat AMD in the performance/watt category. The move to 45nm will certainly help in that area (barring another Prescott SNAFU), but it's still going to be interesting.

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