AMD starts volume Barcelona shipments

New quad-core AMD Opteron processor already powers some HP ProLiant servers

By Sharon Gaudin

April 9, 2008 (Computerworld) Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today began volume shipments of its delayed Barcelona chip.

The company announced that the quad-core Opteron processor, which had been shipping in limited release to some vendors, became generally available today. AMD had started shipping the quad-core server chips last September but was forced to halt shipments when an erratum was found.

While AMD was fixing the Barcelona chip at the silicon level, rival Intel Corp. was busy pushing quad-core processors out the door, giving the company a market-share and mind-share boost over beleaguered AMD. Industry analysts earlier this week blamed AMD's decision to lay off 10% of its workforce on the combined effect of the chip delay, Intel's successes and the U.S. economic slowdown.

"I've lost a bit of faith in AMD," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "I was a huge fan when they [initially] came out with Opteron. If they can get their product out the door on time, with the performance that gets them back to leadership in the market, they could still be OK this year. The hard part is that they have to beat Intel at the game or they're going to be relegated to being the lower-performance, lower-price second choice."

Kishna Weaver, an Opteron product manager at AMD, said the company plans to quickly push out benchmarks for the Barcelona chip to ease concerns and meet users' expectations.

"Opteron has finally arrived," Weaver told Computerworld. "If I could have had it last year, I would have loved to have had it. I think right now that customers are considering performance, power and value. Performance is a big piece of that one, and you'll see [AMD] leadership in a number of benchmarks. But I do think customers are looking for a combination of things."

AMD noted that the new chip is already used in Hewlett-Packard Co.'s ProLiant DL585 G5 desktop and BL685c G5 computers. According to AMD, other hardware vendors will be following HP with Barcelona-powered servers later this quarter.

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