barcelona

It's been a lackluster soccer season so far, especially in my favorite league, the Spanish Primera Division. The performances of the two top teams, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona (Barca), have been inconsistent, and while both have displayed some exceptional skills in their best matches, the passion, the surprise, and the big drama, all of which crucial elements of soccer's unique appeal, have been largely missing.

There is hope that this will change on Sunday when the two archrivals battle each other for the first time this season, in the derby of derbies, "El Cl?sico," … Read more

AMD executives put their best foot forward Thursday during a conference with financial analysts, but only time and a better performance will lift the company out of its 2007 spiral.

The company owned up to its mistakes with Barcelona, its first quad-core server processor, during the conference call. Barcelona will have to be tweaked before it can be sold for general-purpose use, and the revamped chips won't be available until the first quarter of 2008, said Mario Rivas, executive vice president for the computing products group. Systems using Barcelona aren't expected to be available until the second quarter, … Read more

AMD will be forced to delay the ramp of its Barcelona server processor after running into a bug, the company has confirmed.

Barcelona, AMD's first quad-core processor for servers, is shipping to some customers in the high-performance computing market. But the company had hoped to start shipping it to a wider variety of customers this month, as well as introduce a faster model that could better compete with Intel's latest Penryn chips.

Unfortunately for AMD, that's going to have to wait, according to a company spokesman. The Tech Report has an excellent description of the problem that … Read more

The planned launch of Intel's Penryn processors on Monday is the first blow in a one-two punch that might stagger AMD heading into 2008.

Just a few months after the launch of AMD's quad-core Barcelona chips, Intel is hitting back with Penryn, now known as the Xeon 5400 family of processors. A total of 15 server chips are set to launch Monday as well as a new Core 2 Extreme desktop processor, with Penryn chips for mainstream desktops and notebooks scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year.

Penryn is essentially a shrink of the Core architecture … Read more

I admit it. This blog entry is nothing more than pure exultation that Manel Sarasa was kind enough to get me a shirt signed by the Barcelona players. Messi (shown), Deco, Thuram, Puyol, Eto'o, Xavi, Valdes, etc. It's so cool!

I worried about it during my entire flight home from Barcelona. What if one of the baggage handlers stole it? Or if it got ruined somehow? Or lost?

But no, it made it, and I immediately took it around for my neighbors to see (I've made football/soccer fans of all of them). My kids were in … Read more

I watched the Barcelona v. Real Zaragoza match last night. Oh, my! Lionel Messi was inspirational, and has been the source of Barcelona's return to form. I find myself nearly in tears as I watch the beauty of these two goals:… Read more

Earlier this week, Advanced Micro Devices finally introduced the first true quad-core microprocessor in the PC market, code-named "Barcelona" and launched as part of AMD's Opteron line. David Kanter provided an excellent technical analysis of Barcelona on his Real World Technologies site.

Barcelona is not the absolutely fastest processor on the market. For single-core performance, both IBM and Intel offer faster chips. With multiple cores working, Intel and Sun can claim higher performance per socket--Intel because it can put two high-frequency dual-core chips in one socket, and Sun because it has an eight-core processor (the UltraSparc T2).

Although I'm sure AMD wishes it could claim those titles, there's another metric that matters even more to some customers. Barcelona delivers high… Read more

AMD's Barcelona party kicked off Monday night in San Francisco, and the relief was palpable on many faces.

The company formally unveiled Barcelona, AMD's first quad-core server processor, during an event spread over two buildings in San Francisco's Presidio district. The Presidio was once an army base when it made sense to guard the Golden Gate with cannons. AMD executives, employees and partners seem ready to emerge from their bunkers after months hunkered down waiting for cover.

Barcelona gives AMD that cover. "Barcelona was designed to win in four key areas: performance, investment protection, virtualization and … Read more

AMD released its long-awaited Barcelona server chip today while Intel upped its earning forecast, underscoring the importance of AMD's latest release. AMD has lost ground in the server market since Intel launched its Core architecture, and things are even more one-sided with desktops and laptops with Intel's Core 2 Duo processors dominating the scene. While AMD has stated it will role out Barcelona chips for desktops under the Phenom name in December, it released new Opteron server chips today based on its native quad-core architecture.

Unlike Intel's quad-core Xeon parts, which simply package together two dual-core processors, … Read more