SPEC Sends Barcelona Benchmarks to Recycle Bin

AMD has officially announced that Barcelonas are not to be publicly available until 2008. The market is already short of Barcelonas, since the company sells the chips in volume only to their selected customers, after an extremely attentive screening process. As for attentive screening, they should have done this with the chips, rather than with the customers.

Fact is that the Barcelona family has totally disappeared from the face of the Earth. SPEC has pushed things even further and invalidated all AMD K10 benchmarks from their website. Instead, SPEC hangs the "Not Available" card, but did not forget to mention that the benchmarks were not "in compliance with the SPEC CPU2006 run and reporting rules. Specifically, the submitter reported that the result would not meet the SPEC OSG requirements for continued availability".

Which means that, in order to be ranked on the processor's hierarchic scale, you must first exist. In fact, what's a high-end CPU worth if it is just a statistic on a website? SPEC's benchmarking scores are the official pinnacle of performance and serve as guidelines for industry analysts, universities and volume purchasers.

The company had a quick reply to the situation. AMD spokesman Scott Carroll says that the SPEC benchmarking results have been withdrawn upon the company's request. "As soon as we determined that we could only ship Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors earmarked for specific customer deals, we began the process of withdrawing our SPEC scores. As we get closer to the launch of the updated Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors in Q108, we will submit new scores."

The "specific customer deals" mentioned by Carroll refer to usage in businesses where the race condition in the K10 architecture is highly unlikely to occur. Processors running on a motherboard whose BIOS is not patched are likely to encounter lock-ups during nested memory operations, which renders them useless in virtualized workspaces.