Barcelona demo'd at 1.6 GHz, partners question July launch

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

AMD logoLots of news following yesterday’s demonstrations of Barcelona (AMD’s forthcoming quad-core processor) running applications. One of the more interesting stories about what was shown at Computex yesterday comes from DailyTech.

One vendor demonstrated Barcelona to DailyTech running at 1.6GHz. Current AMD Barcelona samples are not scaling too well. AMD partners confirmed the highest running, POST and OS capable, Barcelona processor is 2.0 GHz. AMD previously posted benchmarks of a simulated 2.6 GHz Barcelona [insideHPC coverage].

Here’s the quote that I thought was interesting, especially in light of Cray’s recently announced XT4 delays:

AMD roadmaps show Barcelona-based Opteron processors will launch in July, but the general consensus from partners is the processor isn’t performing well enough for a July launch.

“Quad-core, codenamed Barcelona will launch later this summer, in the July, August kind of time frame — followed by [consumer chips] on the desktop… You’ll see that in the Christmas line-up,” stated Robert Rivet, AMD executive vice president and CFO, just a few months ago.

But if the partners aren’t sure the product is ready to sell, that puts a pretty big question mark on the horizon for me.

You can also find bite-sized coverage in this brief from News.com. [Thanks to reader Paul Adams for sending us some of the links to these stories.]