A “Simulated 2.6GHz” AMD quad-core would beat the best Intel Xeon by 42%, or so we were told back in March at CeBIT. AMD’s latest is server CPU is a device with 463 million transistors designed to run at a clock speed of at least 2.2GHz, possibly 2.8GHz. Scheduled for launch in the middle of 2007, Intel’s best Xeons would be once again in the rearview mirror of their AMD competitors. AMD’s third generation Opteron sure looked very promising back in early spring 2007.
June, July, and August went by, but still no Barcelona, and when the news started to trickle in that AMD’s newest quad-core would only reach 2GHz, AMD’s future didn’t look so bright anymore. It became even worse as the launch date and details of the newest 45nm Xeons popped up on a public webpage for resellers: November the 11th. New Xeons at clock speed up to 3.16GHz are thus only a few months away. “Not so bright” turned into “grim” - even “dark, really dark”.
Surprising no comments, a very insightful article on the workings of barcelona, seems like AMD has a good product and have priced it very aggressively…
I guess ppl interested in phenom and price cut frm intel than reading abt barcelona..as we get nuthin now..no price cut plus barcelona isnt for us..lol
Barcelona = 2-way/8-way procs. They will carry on under the Opteron 2xxx and 8xxx series. The 2xxx and 8xxx procs use Socket F (aka Socket 1207), need corresponding boards + ECC RAM.
Budapest = 1-way/single socket variant of Barcelona. It will carry on under the Opteron 1xxx series. The 1xxx procs work in AM2/AM2+ boards - just like the Opteron 1xx models worked in 939 boards - so the Budapest core procs are what you’re looking for.
Now the catch is, Budapest is also being released at the end of the year around the same time as Phenom. So if you’re hoping to grab some of AMD’s new architecture earlier than Phenom.. i highly doubt that would be possible.
Yep.. but from the initial estimates it looks like AMD have a product that may only tie Conroe and not outdo it. So once again they would have to play the price game. According to Anandtech, the downside to this is that Phenom/Barcelona have a larger die size compared to the older A64/Opteron. Considering they were already suffering losses with the earlier cut-throat pricing, with the larger die sizes it should only increase their losses.