AMD Already Shipping Barcelona, Ahead Of Sept. 10 LaunchAMD Already Shipping Barcelona, Ahead Of Sept. 10 Launch

The big press event touting the official release of its first quad-core processor won't take place until next Monday. But that doesn't mean AMD's long-waited Barcelona server chips are locked up in the company's Dresden fabs."I can tell you that Barcelona is shipping for revenue today," AMD spokesman Phil Hughes confirmed in an email.

What this means is that the processor is already in the hands of the Tier 1 OEMs who will begin shipping Barcelona-based quad-core servers real soon. That list includes all four of the big boys: Sun Microsystems, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell, all of whom currently offer Opteron servers. (Barcelona is a code name; the chips will be the quad-core members of the Opteron family.)

In point of fact, it's not surprising nor is it big news that Barcelona is "shipping" in advance of its formal launch next Monday. Of course it's got to be "shipping" if AMD's OEM partners are to begin selling Barcelona servers at launch. In any case, formal launches these days are pretty much a non-event.

The news about Barcelona has been out and about for some time now. All Monday's press conference will do is give AMD a big bump in coverage. Call it the Zen of the news cycle. Press events are an excuse for reporters too lazy to dig up their own stories to write what they're spoon fed by some company. (I'm not calling out AMD here; everyone does it.) At the same time, Web sites who don't cover such things lose out on traffic everyone else is presumably getting.

So here are a couple of data points that aren't spoon fed (or not the "spoon" part, anyway).

As I've previously written, the biggest recent news about Barcelona is that it'll launch at 2.0-GHz but will ramp quickly (by year's end) to 2.3 GHz. (Read the details here.)

This gives the lie to talk circulating on the Web earlier this summer, to the effect that AMD was screwed because of delays with Barcelona and problems getting its clock speed up.

Instead, what we're going to have -- and this is good news, if you ask me -- is a really healthy, quad-core processor war between AMD and Intel.

There was evidence of that yesterday, when Intel made a point of announcing a high-end Xeon 7300 server quad processor. That news was clearly intended to steal some thunder from AMD's event next Monday.

Indeed, Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel's server group, threw the gauntlet down at AMD when she told EETimes: "We believe we will sustain our leadership in quad-core processor performance, even after AMD rolls out Barcelona."

Performance will be the biggest battleground. But there will also be a war over price. Leaked word is pegging Barcelona pricing at from $688 to $1,004. If that's true, it means that AMD is attempting to price Barcelona pretty much on par with Intel's quad Xeons.

Clearly, though, AMD won't be undercutting Intel on price. That makes sense, when you consider the intense financial pressure AMD has been under for the past year, as well as the traditional requirement in the semiconductor industry that you squeeze the highest ASPs (average selling price) out of your top chip for the short while that that's possible.

On the other hand, don't expect Intel to give AMD much forbearance. A price cut on its part would not be unexpected, and could kick off a brutal quad-core war right out of the gate for AMD.

Another battle point will be 45 nm fab technology versus 65 nm: Intel will be making a bunch of its processors in 45 nm before the end of the year. AMD won't until sometime in 2008. However, this stuff is far less important than either price or performance.

Indeed, after Barcelona "launches" on Monday, the biggest impact on AMD will be how the reviews play out in terms of the performance, both real and perceived, of the chip and of AMD's new 10 architecture.

Among the improvements in Barcelona are the following new features:

Beefed up floating-point support. Earlier processors had 64-bit floating-point execution units. Because of 10h, AMD will be able to equip Phenom and Barcelona with 128-bit floating-point units, if it so chooses. The wider design will double the performance of floating-point vector operations. Instruction-fetching improvements. The fetch window has been widened to 32 bytes from 16 bytes. This will allow the processor to handle a complete sequence of three large instructions per cycle. Large page support. As mentioned earlier, the 10h processors now support 1-GB paging. The feature provides a big benefit to applications, such as multimedia, which operate on large data sets. Instruction-set improvements. These include the addition of two advanced bit-manipulation instructions, which operate on general purpose registers • Virtual machine optimizations. The 10h architecture includes many improvements to boost the performance of AMD's virtualization technology, as well as compiler-related optimizations.

This die shot identifies the different functional units of Barcelona, AMD's upcoming quad-core Opteron. (Click picture to enlarge.)
P.S. Here's some stuff on Intel's Core architecture. Also check out Intel's Hottest Quad Core Ever: Build A QX6850 PC Without Busting Your Budget.