CPU

AMD Says They're Late to The Party

The Barcelona design more difficult than expected

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

21st of August 2007, 13:52 GMT

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While Intel chose the shortest route to quad core processors by putting two dual core CPUs side by side on the same piece of silicon, AMD took the longer route to a true native quad core design that in theory should give their Barcelona and Phenom processing units a big performance advantage. The downside of this approach is the fact that AMD took a route that set it far behind Intel form the release data point of view and the true and native quad core design costs much more to develop and

implement.

AMD's chief executive officer, Hector Ruiz told in an interview that the complicated design of the Barcelona class of CPUs caused the processor manufacturer to lose more than six months. The CEO said that "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", for the newspaper Sunday's Mercury News. According to the news site News.com, during those six months, the server division from AMD had to repair a number of bugs and to face the increasing Intel competition without a powerful enough processor, which led to the now (in)famous price wars.

The AMD design for Barcelona processors stresses the fact that a native quad core implementation will deliver better performance than Intel's method of simply putting two dual core processing units in a single package. While Intel's so called quad core processors may not achieve the full performance benefits of a native and complete quad core solution, it did allow Intel to ship in its CPUs almost a year earlier.

While some think that AMD should have released a CPU similar in design to the one used by Intel, the company says that this solution might not have been feasible as it had to wait for the upgrade of its 65 nanometer production facility in Dresden, Germany. That plant will be used to produce the Barcelonas that are waiting for their fast approaching launch date, the 10th of September.

TAGS:

AMD | quad | core | Barcelona | Intel

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