Paul, Re: "Anand is reaching the same conclusion as everyone else - their may be no BarfOn"
I actually predicted this early last year, when AMD's roadmap first showed a Barton CPU. I was shocked to see so many new cores - all arriving at close to the same time. Since AMD has rarely been one to execute well on even one project at a time, I of course was skeptical that they would have a Thoroughbred, Barton, Clawhammer, and Sledgehammer processor design team, all set to launch in a six month period (which was how the roadmap looked last year).
It's not about AMD's level of competence - it's all about the level of resources required, and with more and more projects, it's just logical that some of them will be spread too thin. AMD may actually feel that SOI K7 CPUs would slow down the progress on the SOI K8 that they so badly want to get to market. The simple solution is to cancel the former, and move the resources to the latter.
We'll have to see what happens. Truthfully, I would have thought Barton to be crucial for AMD's very low power applications, including mobile and dense servers. On the other hand, maybe the cost involved with SOI really is larger than AMD anticipated, and perhaps combined with the desire to move resources to Hammer, Barton simply got cancelled.
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