AMD officially launches Barcelona

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 9/10/2007

After months of anticipation and several delays, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) today debuted its Barcelona quad-core Opteron x86 processor.

Today's quad-core introduction comes 10 months after AMD's rival and industry leader Intel Corp. launched its first quad-core Xeon offerings in November 2006. The two companies have been embroiled in a bitter battle for market share sine 2005, when AMD began capturing a larger slice of the industry's sales and beat Intel to market on several important technology developments including 64-bit memory extensions and dual-core processors. In recent months, however, Intel has seemingly put all of its weight into fighting AMD's ascendance; accordingly, AMD has suffered a series of painful financial losses along with several key executive departures.

Nevertheless, the company has expressed confidence that today's quad-core launch will give it a much-needed boost. AMD has claimed that its quad-core chips are superior to Intel's for several key reasons: Intel's quad-core consists of two dual core die stacked in a single package rather than AMD's quad-core approach that puts four processor cores on a single die; in addition, AMD's chips purportedly offer low power consumption and a low price point in comparison to Intel's offerings. The company claims that these benefits are significant enough to compel customers to have waited for AMD's Barcelona rather than opt for the previously available Intel quad-core.

"Customers that want more power efficiency or virtualization will understand when to make the switch [to quad-core]," Pat Patla, the director of AMD's server workstation segment, told Electronic News in a briefing. "Taking time to do native design does have benefits." Patla also confirmed with Electronic News that AMD has actually been shipping its Barcelona processors to certain customers for revenue for several weeks leading up to today's official launch.  

Barcelona processors, which are designed on 65-nm process technology, also include AMD's direct connect architecture, which the company claims reduces bottlenecks found in legacy front-side bus x86 architectures, and includes an integrated memory controller.  The processors also include a feature called rapid virtualization indexing, which takes functionality that was previously performed in software and performs it within the CPU. Barcelona is compatible with the socket and thermal envelopes of second-generation, dual-core AMD Opteron processors. More than 50 quad-core AMD Opteron processor-ready system choices are on the market today from a bevy of OEMs, AMD said.

AMD will be holding an official launch event for Barcelona this evening in San Francisco.

Despite the company's enthusiasm for Barcelona and its upcoming Phenom quad-core follow-on set to debut in December, investors continue to view AMD with trepidation. Shares for the company opened at a price of $12.92 this morning on the Nasdaq stock market, up 2.4 percent from Friday's closing price of $12.61. By 12:15 p.m eastern today, the company's stock price had dipped down to $12.74 -- worlds away from the $27.90 price the company's shares were trading at one year ago in September 2006. So far, the height of investor exuberance for AMD was seen in March 2006, when the company's stock price hit a high of $42.70 based on its triumphs over Intel.

Intel is continuing to fight back in full against AMD as its quad-core hits market. Last Wednesday, Intel held the official launch of its quad-core processors designed for multi-processor (MP) servers. Although the quad-core Xeon 7300 series processors, which had been code-named "Caneland," have been shipping to customers since June, industry watchers have said that Intel's debut last week seemed timed at least in part to steal some of the quad-core thunder from today's AMD launch.

For more on Barcelona, see "AMD: Praying for a triple, hoping for a home run."