14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has been through some rough times throughout its existence but lately they have suffered one of the worst hits in the history. Now I don't know whether it's about the acquisition of Ati or the fact that Core 2 Duos are faster. Perhaps it's a combination of both. Anyway, AMD lost a big chunk of its market share, R600 is late and HD 2900 XT cards are not as fast as 8800 Ultras, Barcelona is still on pre-production. And the story could go on for some time.
At the moment AMD is thinking of closing down some of its fabs and becoming a fabless chip producer just as Nvidia. However that may prove to be a challenge since both TSMC and UMC are already working at full capacity. And to make matters even worse, AMD has announced all its partners and resellers that mass production for the Barcelona chip line will enter a straight line only on August.
First chips will enter market in mid-August according to AMD. However the company hasn't released any information regarding the actual speed of the chips or their internal structure. Also at the moment the availability of 1207-pin based PhenomFX series is unknown.
I don't think that first Barcelona-based CPUs that will enter the stores will be socket F (L1) because AMD's 4x4 platform has been pretty unsuccessful. However we should be able to see some real-life bechies with AM2+ parts in about 2 months or so. In the end one more thing has to be taken into account. Early benchmarks have shown that Barcelona is about as fast as a similar clocked Core 2 Quad CPU. However it's not faster and INTEL still has the upper hand when it comes to speed. And that can only make me wonder how AMD is going to compensate for about 1GHz of speed. Lower prices, anyone?
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