Nice article Anand...
One point, you stated "By the middle of this year AMD's Fab 36 will be completely transitioned over to 65nm"...
Not to pick nits, but didn't AMD just recently announce that all wafer starts were now 65nm at Fab 36? (or are you speaking of wafer outs...?)

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Excellent article Anand! Feels very "honest", i think many big corporations must change the way the think about transparency towards the public. Great work.

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I am delighted to hear that AMD is on the bounce, as i have always cheered for them.

With the exception of my current C2D PC, i have always bought AMD rigs:
1.2GHz Thunderbird
1.7GHz Thoroughbred
2.0GHz Athlon 64
2.0GHz Athlon X2

So no-one will be more than happy than I to be able to return to the fold, with a shiny new AMD quad-core.

However, if you expect me to buy AMD powered chipsets and graphics cards, then AMD had better pull their socks up on linux support.

I buy nvidia chipsets and graphics cards not because they make better hardware than AMD/ATI, but because i know that i have excellent support in the form of BOTH windows and linux driver support.

Sort that out and I may become an entirely AMD devotee.

If AMD sticks with cack linux drivers along with scuppering nVidia support, then I will wave goodbye to AMD and buy a second Intel/nVidia rig in Autumn this year.

Best of luck AMD, I want you to succeed.

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It's a known fact that Intel has had to try and copy the best features of AMD's products to catch up in performance to AMD. Funny how when Intel was secretive and blackmailing consumers for 30 years that was fine but when AMD doesn't give away all of their upcoming product technical info. for Intel to copy, that's not good -- according to some. With Intel being desperate to generate sales for their non-competitive products over the past 2-3 years, they decided to really manipulate the media - and it's worked. The once secretive Intel is the best friend a hack can find these days. They'll tell a hack anything to get some form of media exposure.

I find AMD's release of info. just fine. If it were not for AMD all consumers would be paying $1000 for a Pentium 90 CPU today and that would be the fastest CPU you could buy. People tend to forget all that AMD has done for consumers. The world would be a lot worse off than it is if it were not for AMD stepping to the plate to take on the bully from Satan Clara.

Many in the media are shills and most of the media is manipulated by unscrupulous companies like Intel, Asus, and a long list of others. Promise a hack some "inside info." or insiders tour so they can get a scoop or a prototype piece of hardware that has been massaged for better performance than the production hardware and the fanboy hacks will write glowing opine about a companies products and chastise the competition every chance they get.

Unfortunately what was once a useful service - honest product reviews -- is now a game of shilling for dollars. You literally can't believe anything reported at 99% of websites these days because it's usually slanted based on which way the money flows... It's no secret that Intel and MICROSUCKS are more than willing to lubricate the wheels of the ShillMeisters to get favorable tripe.


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So with your logic, if the reviews about Barcelona end up being positive and glowing then we know AMD paid off the reviewers?

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Oh man, AMD copied, in fact, all Intel patents, due to their "exchange". They copied x86 instruction set, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, and many others. Intel was the first to come up with 64-bit Itanium.

And AMD is/was damn expensive, while it had a window of opportunity. My most expensive CPU ever bought was AMD X2 4400+ ;-)

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Yeah, and the cheapest CPU I ever bought was an AMD Sempron for $29.

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What does the 64-bit Itanium have to do with x86. Totally different instruction set.

And what would the Intel equivalent to your X2 4400+ have cost you at the time? Or was there even an Intel equivalent.

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Not only that, but HP had more to do with the design than Intel.

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I bought X2 because I wanted NVIDIA SLI (2x6800, 2x7800, 2x7900, etc.) with dualcore, so Pentium D was not an option (NVIDIA chipsets for Intel are even worse than for AMD, if that is possible).

X2 was more expensive than my current quadcore, Q6600, and performed really BAD in all things except games.

I hated that CPU, while paying about $850 (including VAT) for it. For audio and video processing, it was a horrible CPU, worse than my previous P4 Northwood with HT, bought for $100, not to mention unstable NVIDIA nForce4 boards, SATA problems, NVIDIA firewall problems, etc.

I never want to see AMD again. Intel CPU + Intel chipset = pure godness.

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