AMD Goes on the Offensive
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AMD finally rolls out Barcelona. Click here to read more.
It changed a lot of the rules of the game. A lot of people have forgotten because it was 2003 when we introduced that product, and the introduction of that product really changed a lot of peoples view of where the enterprise was going. On one hand, you had the extension of 64-bit to 32-bit with x86, and that was really a smart thing to do.
In my view that was the beginning of the demise of [Intels] Itanium.
Back in those days, [Opteron] still really had a strong presence, but it did a lot of other things, too. It created an architecture that was very efficient.
At the same time we launched Opteron, we started working on Barcelona, which was the next step. The interim step that we took between Opteron and Barcelona was the dual-core introduction, which took the single-core Opteron and created a dual-core version of it, but all that time we were looking ahead to Barcelona.
People had invested in software as well as ecosystem—the hardware ecosystem and, of course, the software ecosystem. One of the things that dual-core Opteron taught us about was how powerful that was because people were able to upgrade to dual-core Opteron rather easily.
One of the things we are doing again with Barcelona is protecting the investment our customers had made for a long time. It is going to fit into the system, and its going to fit into the same thermal envelope, and, therefore, its going to have the opportunity for people to adopt it and use it at a much faster rate than they would otherwise.
The other thing that Opteron did was begin to change peoples views of energy-efficient computing, which was critical. So we believe that, in terms of performance per watt, [Barcelona] will continue to set a strong leadership position for our customers.
The other piece—again, we were looking ahead developing the Opteron family—was that virtualization was really going to become more and more significant over time. We put a lot of work into Barcelona to make it very efficient as a virtualization machine. I believe, and our customers are telling us, that in terms of performance relative to virtualization, it is going to be a phenomenal machine—very scalable and a lot of things that are very critical.
Then when you come down to the last piece, we put a lot of effort into putting in a world-class floating point capability in this device, so it will have very strong raw performance. So we are very excited and champing at the bit to see Barcelona out there.
What is the most significant technological advantage that Barcelona has over the dual-core Opteron besides the addition of two more cores to the silicon?
That is a tough question. I really think that when we look at Opteron and then when we look at Barcelona, Barcelona is an improvement on all the things we just talked about.
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