AMD's Barcelona Has Some Problems

As the date for the release of the world's first native quad core processing unit approaches, a number of less than pleasant details surface. As the official launch date is less than a month away, it looks quite improbable that out of the box fixes that do not need the user's interventions for those problems will be released in time.

Some of the problems that seem to plague AMD's only hope of remaining competitive against Intel who is launching a few new processors every month and reducing the pricing of all the older models, are related to the fact the Barcelona cored CPUs are having some compatibility problems with a type or another of mainboards.

Rumor has it that Barcelona's power saving technologies, the very same technologies that gave AMD an edge over its rival Intel, will not function properly or at all unless users choose to update or flash their BIOSes. Some users may be lucky though and have compatible motherboards.

Even with the new freshly flashed BIOS, some motherboard models may not be able to fully support the power saving technologies implemented by AMD into the Barcelona processors, so a new mainboard might be needed. "It seems the CPU itself is capable of engaging in CoolCore operations, but not Dual Dynamic Power Management (formerly "Split Plane," which allowed each core to operate independently with different voltages and clock speeds). It won't be able to handle these power saving and performance enhancing aspects of operations from the core alone. The motherboard must be brought into the mix in an active way to help reduce power consumption and save energy when the many cores are not in high use."

Without the energy saving features enabled, the processor will use a lot more power and beside that, it will be hotter. One other problem is that almost no software package will be able to take full advantage of the wide 128 bit floating point unit as the software would need to be recompiled with specific support for it. As 64 bit software hits large scale developing after a few years from the release of the supporting hardware layer, and multicore processor architecture is not even in the process of being adopted for software optimization technologies, it may take a long time until the software industry finally starts moving and implements some sort of optimization routine for processors like Barcelana that support an 128 bits floating point technology.