AMD Launches Long-Awaited Barcelona Quad-Core

For all the enthusiasm in the OEM and system builder channel for Barcelona -- and it really is genuine -- questions still remain about AMD's quad-core offering.

For starters, AMD has posted an operating loss for three straight quarters. It's questionable whether Barcelona's impact will be felt soon enough to turn things around before Q4 of 2007 or even well into 2008. The chipmaker publicly blames its woes on what it frequently describes as the "monopolistic practices" of its chief rival, Intel. Yet even AMD executives concede that the lack of any quad-core product to stack up against Intel's for so many months has been damaging.

"Our competitor may have enjoyed a brief window of exclusivity in offering a quad-core product, but that window is shut," AMD CEO Hector Ruiz told ChannelWeb, putting as bright a face as possible on what will have been a 271-day "window of exclusivity" for Intel in the quad-core market.

Former chief sales and marketing officer Henri Richard was even blunter at AMD's Analyst Day in July.

"Right now, there's parts of the market where I can't compete," he said during a press conference at AMD's Sunnyvale, Calif. campus, describing AMD's lack of a quad-core product until Barcelona starts shipping.

Richard left AMD in late August to take a job at Freescale Semiconductor, which brings up another possible sore point for the chipmaker -- a recent rash of resignations by top executives. In addition to the outspoken Richard, two executives who came to AMD from graphics chipmaker ATI following its acquisition last October have also left. Former ATI CEO David Orton resigned in late July and Rick Hegberg, senior vice president of worldwide sales at AMD, left Sept. 4.

At first glance, the long wait for Barcelona presents a stark contrast to the conditions under which AMD achieved some of its greatest triumphs, first with the initial Opteron offering and later with its dual-core product, both of which put Intel on its back foot for several quarters. But look a bit closer, and the circumstances aren't as different as they seem, say AMD executives, channel partners and analysts.

Ruiz says AMD has prepared its Tier 1 OEMs and channel partners to hit the ground running from Barcelona's launch date.

"We have nine validated server platforms at launch, a first for AMD, and AMD's channel partners can be early to market with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based solutions. We have more than 50 quad-core-ready platforms available through leading OEMs like Acer, Cray, Dell, Egenera, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Gateway HP, IBM and Sun for the VAR community. All of these are upgradeable to Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with a switch of the chip and a BIOS flash," he says.

Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron thinks the pace at which AMD is planning to get its x86 quad-core into servers and workstations makes up for some of the time lost to Intel.

"The product that AMD is introducing will drop into exisiting dual-core server sockets pretty easily. A lot of their OEM customers are waiting for this product to do a platform refresh themselves. We should see a rapid conversion to Barcelona products, basically right at launch," McCarron says.

The analyst thinks the gains AMD made in the market with the first edition of Opteron will pay off in a rapid rollout of Barcelona.

"What we'll end up seeing is a repeat of what we saw with the original Opteron. It did take several years for them to get significant presence with the original Opteron, to get those Tier 1 OEMs. And now they have the OEMs to drop in quad-core, and waiting for it. So the ramp-up for the quad-core is likely to be significantly faster than with the original Opteron. Factor in the time AMD has fallen behind Intel on quad-core, and it about evens out," he says.

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