BAD HARDWARE WEEK

Barcelona had to be announced on June 6th.
But, just as bad hardware found earlier:
AMD partners confirmed the highest running, POST and OS capable, Barcelona processor is 2.0 GHz.

That is why Barcelona was postponed the whole two or three months backward. It is necessary to tweak 65nm process and chip yields to at least 2.1+ Ghz clock to be cost/performance effective against the Intel. I admit that Intel is pretty well optimized towards two cores jobs.And AMD of course, needs some time to respin its design. The problem is that any additional delay requires change of corporate price policy and future strategy.

The guys from DailyTech had the opportunity to run a quick test on a quad-core AMD Barcelona PC at Computex:
We only had a few minutes to test the chip, but testers were able to run a quick 64bit Cinebench 9.5 before they were instructed to leave.


The AMD benchmark ran on a single-socket, K10 CPU running at 1.6 GHz on NVIDIA’s nForce Professional 3400 chipset. According to the system properties, the AMD system used 4GB of DDR2-667.
The most similar Intel system we could muster up on such short notice was an Intel Xeon 3220. The Xeon X3220 is clocked at 2.4 GHz, and ran on Intel’s Garlow workstation chipset (Intel X38). This system property profile stated the system utilized 4GB of DDR2-800.
Cinebench completed the default benchmark in 27 seconds for the 1.6 GHz K10; 17 seconds for the Intel Xeon X3220. The Kentsfield Xeon was 58% faster with […]

Thus, Barcelona has to be clocked up to 2,5 Ghz to run faster than Kentsfield competitor. We hope it will be in a month or two. After that, think about forthcoming 8 core dual die Barcelona. Intel will suck even in 45nm !. No NEED FOR BUDAPEST.

Speeds and Feeds
	Core 2 Extreme QX6800	Penryn Quad	Penryn Duo
Codename	Kentsfield	Yorkfield	Wolfdale
Clock Speed	2.93GHz	3.33GHz	3.33GHz
Process	65nm	45nm	45nm
Cores	4	4	2
Total L2 Cache	8MB	12MB	6MB
Front Side Bus	1,066MHz	1,333MHz	1,333MHz
3DMark06 CPU	4,047	4,944	3,068
3DMark06 Overall	11,252	11,969	11,020
Mainconcept H.264 (sec)	89.05	72.75	119.22
Cinebench 10	10,551	12,900	7,061
Cinebench 9.5	1,541	1,917	1,125
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast (fps)	153.14	213.03	206.06
Divx 6.6 (sec)	38	18	22

Shareholders, pic down is how Intel tweaks Cinebench 10 results for 45nm processors ! ! !


However, all hardware arse holes talking these days missed to notice one important thing:
AMD has to fight with Intel in two gladiator arenas SIMULTANEOUSLY. Luckily, it has now two fabs to be tweaked for two different types of market requests: high performance and low pertformance. But AMD previously has to conquire market share to make a sense of it.
And AMD did it, regardless of enormous shares fall collaterals.
So, some journo slots don't forget: AMD is alive and well kicking !.