Barcelona

AMD chief: Barcelona six months late

The "complicated" design that AMD chose for Barcelona, its first quad-core server processor, caused more than six months of delays before the chip was ready, CEO Hector Ruiz told the San Jose Mercury News.

In an interview published in Sunday's Mercury News (the excerpts don't seem to be online yet), Ruiz said "every time we ran into a gotcha (or a technical glitch), it created a six-week-or-so hole in the schedule as we went back and fixed it. We hoped we wouldn't get many of those, but in the Barcelona case, we got more … Read more

AMD's September launch party could bring Barcelona

It looks like AMD will raise the curtain on its Barcelona server processor at George Lucas' office on September 10.

The company's PR firm sent out invitations to "the most anticipated premiere of 2007," which I would have thought was The Simpsons Movie (go see it, it's better than I thought it would be), but which for AMD is most definitely Barcelona, its long-awaited quad-core server processor.

AMD needs Barcelona to get its server division back on track. The company has been forced to cut the prices of its dual-core Opteron chips to compete with Intel'… Read more

AMD maps out server plans for next two years

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--AMD will unveil a new chip design in 2009 for the server market and faster versions of its Barcelona quad-core chip later this year, company executives said Thursday.

AMD's near-term goal is to get its Barcelona quad-core chip out into the market. The company has already said it plans to launch Barcelona chips at 2GHz later this quarter, but it also plans to ship faster versions of those chips in the fourth quarter, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server products division, at a technology analyst meeting at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters. … Read more

Boeing rolls out the 787 Dreamliner

Boeing rolls out the 787 Dreamliner (here). Yup, that's the airplane I want.

Often missed in the news coverage is that Boeing has yet to announce exactly how the 787's composite structures-- skin, wings, tail, etc.-- are made. Early in the project there were some very definite rumors that Boeing had decided to go with a new kind of carbon-titanium composite made from layers of carbon fibers alternating with layers of titanium foil. The combination was said to have more fatigue resistance and a longer service life.

But as far as I know, Boeing has never addressed … Read more

Another day, another microprocessor delay

CNET's Stephen Shankland wrote on Friday about AMD's announcement that its four-core Barcelona server processor has been delayed until August. This is just a couple of months later than the previous estimate of "mid-year." Faster versions will arrive in the fourth quarter.

Shankland did a good job with the story, as usual. He skipped quickly over the "delay" issue because that's not really very important. Two months' delay in any product is costly and unfortunate, but it's usually a second-order effect.

What really matters is the value of the product when it … Read more

AMD's native quad-core CPUs on track

We love it when we're right. Okay, so it isn't exactly a surprise, but AMD's announcement that its native quad-core Opterons will ship in August means that, as long as the company hits that ship date, we don't have to update the old CPU road map feature. What it means for you is less certain.

If AMD's plans stay on track, the quad-core tech that comes late this summer to AMD's server/workstation Opterons should roll into AMD's forthcoming Phenom desktop and laptop CPUs later this year. And on paper, AMD could have … Read more

AMD: Barcelona on time, but Budapest slips

Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung has begun suspecting that Advanced Micro Devices' quad-core "Barcelona" processor is late, but the chipmaker said Tuesday that it remains on schedule. However, shipments to supercomputer maker Cray of a close Barcelona relative code-named Budapest have slipped.

There is "no delay" for Barcelona, spokesman Phil Hughes said Tuesday. The chips, and some systems using the chips, will be available in the third quarter, he said.

Barcelona is a strategically important chip for AMD, as it tries to regain market share lost to Intel's newer Core 2-based Xeon server processors, the dual-core … Read more

Bienvenido, Motorola Q2?

As some of you phone fanatics may know, the 3GSM World Congress is coming up soon in Barcelona, Spain (unfortunately, Crave won't be there in person sipping on Spanish wine along Las Ramblas, err, I mean, to cover the event). The annual conference brings together the cell phone industry to discuss and showcase the latest 3G technologies and developments, and in recent years, it has also served as backdrop to some pretty cool product announcements. Now, based on some blogosphere rumblings, it looks like this year won't be any different. According to Engadget Mobile, Motorola is prepping to … Read more