AMD's Quad-Core Opteron: Factoids, and Fanboys Masquerading As Journalists

Back in October of last year, I admittedly ‘tore into’ Tom Yager, InfoWorld’s supposed ‘Test Center Chief Technologist’ and consistent AMD apologist (versus the ethical journalist that he should be, and that I always strive to be). Well, Tom’s up to his old tricks again. Check out these choice excerpts from his recent Barcelona ‘coverage‘:

I believe that I have as deep a conceptual understanding of Barcelona as any non-engineer outside AMD, and the more I learned, the more convinced I was that I was looking at a mind-blowing architecture.

I developed grand expectations for Barcelona, but AMD cautioned me not to expect too much in the way of trouncing Intel in benchmarks. AMD’s marketing played down the reach of Barcelona’s redesign, but this didn’t line up with what AMD’s engineers were teaching me.

I looked at the details of Barcelona, wondering where AMD could make its mark in a field already filled with such beautiful engineering. Now, sitting on the floor in front of Barcelona (by remote control), I am speechless.

AMD is blazing trails in more ways than one. It’s Barcelona day, week, month, and who knows how long after that. I’m jazzed.

To quote Moon Unit Zappa, "I’m like so sure. It’s like barf me out. Gag me with a spoon. Totally."

Compare Yager’s partisan, pontificating tripe with my unbiased writeup published yesterday morning, along with its predecessor from last Thursday. See why I’m steamed? One bad lawyer ruins the reputation of the entire legal profession…one bad car salesperson gives all car salespeople a bad name…and one Tom Yager…suffice it to say that I suggest you stick with EDN, folks, to get the straight story.

Yager’s bias aside, I’ll reiterate that I do think ‘Barcelona’ has intriguing potential. To that point, I’ll share some interesting ‘Did You Know’ statistics from the Fact Sheet on AMD’s Quad-Core Opteron portal:

• Engineering work on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors began in Q3 of 2004.
• The design of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor was a global effort led by the design team in Austin, Texas with major contributions from AMD’s India Design Center as well as designers in Sunnyvale, California.
• Approximately 400 engineers and 1.5 million man-hours went into the design of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors.
• The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor was a company-wide initiative that involved thousands of employees around the globe. Vital production efforts took place in:
  • Manufacturing: Fab 36 in Dresden, Germany, where all AMD Opteron processors will be manufactured
  • Test, Mark and Pack: Singapore
  • Assembly: Penang, Malaysia
• One Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor has approximately 463 million transistors in current logic and a total of more than 600 million physically on the die.
• The first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors will be produced with AMD’s fourth generation, most advanced 65nm process, which includes the latest strained silicon engineering to act as a key enabler of improved performance-per-watt. Specific process technologies include:
  • Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process lowers power consumption and improves performance
  • Dual-stress liner (DSL) technology increases transistor performance, while controlling power consumption and heat dissipation
  • Embedded silicon germanium (e-SiGe) delivers a 40 percent potential increase in transistor performance, reduced power consumption and heat dissipation, and high product yields
• Depending on workload, it would take five original Single-Core AMD Opteron processors to equal the performance of one Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor.
• The die size of one Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is 285 mm².

Followup: I’d also like to draw your attention to an excellent AMD-vs-Intel analysis done by BetaNews.