Barcelona release date set.......

[maverik-sg1]

The inquirer confirms the following:

THE FIRST AMD chips using the Barcelona core will be released on September 10th, with the first chips to surface being a 1.9GHz 2348 and a 2GHz 2350.

Other chips will follow in October of this year although a 2354, which is a 2.2GHz microprocessor, is likely to be available in August through channel distribution.

Sources close to AMD's plans in Taiwan tell the INQ that AMD hopes to get 2.5GHz bins out of Barcelona, although dates for such beasts are not yet available.

What we do have now is a projected chart for the chips, which are double socket quad cores with 64K x 4 L1 cache, 512K x 4 L2 cache, so 2MB shared cache.

Other chips are the 8348 at $790; the 8350 at $1,025; the 8352 TBA; the 8354 at $1,190 and the 8356 at $1,550. No firm dates for many of these chips are yet available. µ

 

[Master_G]

1.9-2GHz? I doubt that will be fast enough to make a real impact on Intel, im guessing Intel is pretty happy if those are the clockspeeds.

At least AMD will finally get something out the door.

G

 

[Arterion]

1.9-2GHz? I doubt that will be fast enough to make a real impact on Intel, im guessing Intel is pretty happy if those are the clockspeeds.

At least AMD will finally get something out the door.

Surely nowadays more than ever before clock speeds are becoming less and less indicative of performance?

If they were really going to be that far behind would AMD bother releasing such low clocks at all?

 

[Master_G]

Surely nowadays more than ever before clock speeds are becoming less and less indicative of performance?

If they were really going to be that far behind would AMD bother releasing such low clocks at all?

Im not basing my statement purely on clockspeed.

Im basing it on the "info" (read: heresay) that we have of how much work is done per clock cycle, such as the cinebench which indicated that Barcelona isnt as strong as Penryn clock for clock. This is the best i have to go on, im not simply going on the clockspeed.

With sources saying the chip only "comes alive" at 2.6GHz, (http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3006&p=2 ) i dont think the core does close to enough work to best a Penryn at 3GHz, which has been demonstrated, 50% extra work per cycle to make up for a 50 clockspeed increase? If they can pull it off i will be very impressed, but i have my doubts.

My reasons for thinking that AMD will release anything at all is simply to get something out of the door to try to keep the financial wolves at bay. AMD is strapped for cash, needs to raise some, and has been selling nothing but the future, hot air and, frankly, quite a bit of BS lately with respect to release dates. Getting anything out of the door (what was the original release date of Barcelona, Q1?) to prove they can (a) say something that is the truth, (b) show that they can make stuff and that they are coming up with stuff, (c) something new they can trumpet to actual customers, rather than to geeks and journos at trade fairs, and (d) to get AMD closer to Intel than they currently are and maybe try to make some cash, though that may not be easy(if you have lemons, make lemonade idea)

Now these are just my own thoughts and ramblings based on what i read, i am very willing to hear other ideas, thoughts and ramblings on the subject

G

 

[maverik-sg1]

I have to agree with Master G - the release is already late - that was based on two things - switching to 65nm was not as easy as going from 110 to 90nm and original tweaking did not yield the results everyone at AMD was hoping for.

Of course, purchasing ATI has created a lot of problems too in terms of finances and the fact that ATI was itself struggling to find the performance to keep up with Nvidia - so all in all the new company had two products that although are good, were not the best or close enough to be the best and both have had serious issues when it comes to delivering the product to the people.

I think that Barcelona will perform well if only they can up the clocks, if not then I think its just a question of being able to pitch that product at teh rigth price to the target market where it will exel (HTPC, low power, possibly mobile market) - I think the stage will be set for a 45nm battle though - but lets get this one out the way.

I think the good news(if you can call it that) is that Intel have their own issues with native quad core - and in fact multi core programming is still not easy, I fell sure that AMD would of been a lot happier if 64bit computing was the normality now instead of this drive to have 4 cores that in all honesty is white elephant in terms of real world power for the gaming/everyday community.

Lets not lose sight that if the price is right mainstream users will still buy it - after all its not like Intel stopped selling Pentium processors for the 5 years where AMD was the performance king - also relatively speaking, AMD are a lot closer to overall performance than Intel ever were to the AMD during the netburst years of Pentium 4.

Just like GPU's we all wish CPU's were so closely matched that the only real thing we all hoped for was a price war for our business