AMD Gives Demonstration
Of New 'Barcelona' Chips
By DON CLARK
November 30, 2006 2:12 p.m.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Thursday gave the first demonstration of a chip, code-named Barcelona, that is crucial for staying in the performance race with Intel Corp.
The new chip, designed for server systems, squeezes the equivalent of four electronic brains on a single piece of silicon, compared with two processors on existing models. Pat Patla, an AMD director of marketing, said initial testing suggests Barcelona will offer 40% to 70% greater performance than its "dual-core" Opteron chips.
Intel beat AMD to market with what it calls "quad-core" products, but they are actually two dual-core chips packaged together. AMD, of Sunnyvale, Calif., doesn't plan to offer such products, preferring what it calls its "native" quad-core approach.
One advantage, Mr. Patla said, is that Barcelona will draw the same amount of power as AMD's dual-core products -- to make it easy for customers to upgrade their servers by plugging in a new chip. One downside is that the chip won't be ready until next summer.
That's partly because Barcelona requires a new generation of manufacturing technology that draws lines of circuitry with dimensions of 65 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Intel has been selling 65-nanometer chips since October of 2005.
Mr. Patla said the Barcelona prototypes showed that AMD's 65 nanometer process is on schedule. The first server tested with the chip has four Barcelona chips, or 16 processors in all, he said.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
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