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 than we thought. By the time we got through fixing them all, we were six months-plus later from where we originally wanted to be."
That's been a very difficult six months for AMD, as its server division suffered through a price war without a fresh new product to parade before server buyers.
The September launch of Barcelona will come six months later than AMD had hoped, according to its CEO, Hector Ruiz.
(Credit: AMD)AMD chose to put four processor cores on a single piece of silicon when creating Barcelona. The company thinks that this will deliver better performance than Intel's method of building a quad-core chip, but it was trickier to implement. Intel simply put two dual-core chips together in a single package, and while that won't win any awards from chip design purists, it did allow Intel to ship quad-core chips in November of last year. Barcelona is only now shipping to AMD's partners, and it will be formally launched on September 10, Ruiz confirmed.
The delay, along with Intel price cuts, forced AMD to significantly discount the prices of its dual-core server chips to compete and eroded its profits. You have to wonder whether AMD could have released a packaged quad-core chip months ago while still working on Barcelona if it had bit the bullet and given up on its "native quad-core" marketing strategy.
That might have erased AMD's biggest advantage over Intel: the integrated memory controller it uses to deliver a fast pipeline between the processor and system memory. And given AMD's manufacturing constraints late last year while waiting for its new 65-nanometer facility to come online in Dresden, packaged quad-core chips might not have been feasible.
But you've got to think that AMD would have loved to have any kind of quad-core design out earlier this year, so it could have competed against Intel's Xeon chips without having to resort to bargain basement pricing. And that might have been worth further delays to Barcelona, even though Intel is getting ready to launch its second-generation quad-core Penryn chip before Thanksgiving.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
If AMD has fallen for the bait of "quad now!" then they would be even further behind int he native quad cores than they are. As it stands, they loose some headway in exchange for delivering a true quad core cpu before Intel can. This will probably make AMD's quad core more efficient, and faster than Intel's "quad core" CPUs.
Personally I'm glad that AMD took the high road. I'm tired of half way attempts at products. We need more true improvements in products like AMD's quad core.
- My companies will go Barcelona
- by bcroner August 25, 2007 12:50 AM PDT
- It's not mistimed for me. I'm late as hell too. Breakthrough brainwork is rough on the nerves. Nervous problems hold you back. But late is better than never. Plus, who was I to say that I'd solve the P vs NP problem? Try finding a better frying pan for your nerves than that kind of a jolt. My companies will all be computer-based, heavily-dependent on the power promised by AMD Barcelona Processors.
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