September 12th, 2007
AMD: Is closing the quad-core deficit enough?
AMD kicked off the “premier” of their latest microprocessor offering with a launch party at the Herbst International Exhibit Hall Monday night. Partners like VMware, HP, Dell, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and others were on hand or were there by video link to celebrate the launch of AMD’s single-die quad-core milestone processor. Barcelona is critical for AMD since it was getting battered by Intel’s ten-month head start in quad-core processors which used a cheaper-to-manufacture dual-die process.
AMD argues that its single-die “native quad-core” process with its lower latency is architecturally superior to Intel’s dual-die process. But the challenges of manufacturing a massive 283mm squared die with high yields and high clock speeds is daunting and the fact that Barcelona is 6 months late and 600 MHz short makes this fact painfully clear. AMD’s executive VP Mario Rivas admitted back in March that he wished AMD had “immediately done a MCM - two dual cores and call it a quad-core” if he could do it all over again. Intel takes the easy manufacturing route of combining two 143mm squared dies which allows Intel to mix and match the best combinations. Intel’s soon to launch 45nm chip takes the die size down to an even more manageable 107mm squared.
Earlier this year, AMD had told several news organizations such as ZDNet and TGDaily that Barcelona will outperform Intel’s Clovertown 2.66 GHz quad-core processor by margins of 20 and 50 percent on both integer and floating point. It was initially implied that AMD was comparing a 2.6 GHz Barcelona processor, but it wasn’t confirmed until AMD distributed 2.6 GHz benchmarks in July with similar performance claims. The actual launch speed for Barcelona was 2.0 GHz and it fell short of AMD’s original claims by a significant margin. The actual benchmarks which were leaked to me last Friday which are now confirmed by published SPEC.org results indicate a 24% deficit on SPECint_rate2006 and a 15.4% lead on SPECfp_rate2006 over Intel’s best two-socket processors which is a far cry from the 20 and 50 lead claimed by AMD earlier in the year.
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George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
