AMD Launches Long-Awaited Barcelona Quad-Core

Tier 1 OEM Hewlett-Packard, which ships 37 percent of all Opteron-based servers, says it will start shipping AMD quad-core systems through its x86 ProLiant line beginning in Q4.

AMD platinum partner Appro International is "completely ready to go with quad-core" but it may take some time to get systems shipped because customers will need to do benchmark testing before the purchase, says Maria McLaughlin, director of marketing at the Milpitas, Calif.-based high-performance computing OEM. "We're putting together a lot of big deals with Barcelona already. But the sales cycle takes a lot of time. We're cooking up a big deal that we'll announce in October with a major data center," she says.

McLaughlin says AMD provided Appro with Barcelona samples with plenty of time to spare ahead of today's launch.

"We had one at LinuxWorld [in mid-August] that was pretty good, but now as far as the BIOS goes, it's really good. Everything they've been stating in terms of power, and memory in terms of bandwidth, and having the native quad-core and floating point, have been the biggest things for processor-intensive computing," she says.

Other partners haven't been as pleased with the release of samples. Dominic Daninger of Nor-Tech subsidiary REASON, says he'd have liked to receive Barcelona samples sooner. He suspects that issues with processor speed caused sample delays, not to mention the delay of the product release itself.

"I think they had a lot of trouble getting the speed up to where they'd like to have it. A lot of what you read over the last several months is that they had trouble with that. But I've also heard that the silicon for the Phenom is really coming out well, as far as speed," says Daninger, vice president of engineering at the Burnsville, Minn.-based maker of high-end engineering workstations.

Rumors of dissatisfaction about sample release were not lost on Intel. A spokesperson for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip leader told ChannelWeb, "Usually before a major launch, we have samples out at least a month before."

AMD might not have quite the "game-changer" it says it does, but if the chipmaker's main claims about Barcelona prove to be accurate, Daninger says they'll have a saleable product on their hands.

"It was a leapfrog game, and AMD leaped Intel, and now Intel has at least caught up and moved ahead in some areas. I'm not sure if there's going to be an AMD leap ahead of Intel this time. But we're hoping it proves out to be a very powerful floating point. If two of the benchmark areas, the floating point and the handling of massive amounts of memory, prove to be very strong, we'll have some interesting products to bring to market," he says.

Velocity Micro's Copeland expects that AMD's quad-core family of processors will find reasonable purchase in his shop.

"We've been as high as 80 percent AMD, and then when Core 2 Duo came along, it went to 90:10 Intel, almost overnight. But when Phenom arrives, I expect we'll move to about 75:25 Intel. Once we've got benchmarks, that could go higher," Copeland says.

Rain Recording's Paschick may have spent two decades selling Intel, but talk to him on the eve of Barcelona's launch and he almost sounds like an AMD evangelist. He says a 50-50 split between Intel and AMD product in his shop is not out of the realm of possibility, and he has some choice words for Intel, should the chip leader become complacent with its current market dominance.

"Intel, in my opinion, is holding the industry hostage on the mobile platform. Somebody like a Dell, like a Gateway, like a Tier 1, taught the marketplace that you can have a notebook for under $400. And the cheapest Intel CPU in the system builder channel is over $200? There's inequity there," he says.

"We've seen this sort of thing before in our industry. When Sony came out with the Betamax, it was fantastic technology, but they wouldn't license out the transport tech. So JVC and Phillips came out with VHS and the rest is history. Intel's not going anywhere, but I think they're going to start feeling the winds of change."

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