They’ve taken longer than expected, but AMD’s Barcelona chips are finally with us. Here we chart the progress of the processor, from the initial launch announcement to the arrival of the first batch of silicon.
20 September 2006
AMD outlines its plans for Barcelona. The company boasts it will be the first “native” quad-core chip on the market. “A native quad-core chip is when all the cores are integrated into the same silicon area, not on different packs or multichip modules,” says AMD’s technical director, Giuseppe Amato. “Intel will be first to market, only to change the design to true quad core later.”
AMD says the quad-core 65nm processors will include 2MB of a new Level 3 cache, which is shared by all the cores on the die, as well as 512KB of Level 2 cache and 64KB of Level 1 cache.
The chips are scheduled to appear in the first half of 2007 – first for servers, but then rolled out across desktop and laptops. Click here for full story
28 September 2006
Just days later, Intel’s senior vice president, Pat Gelsinger, pokes fun at Barcelona at IDF. “The server version of quad-core, we’ll have a million units before the competition ships one,” he claims. He then proceeds to type “I hate AMD” as his password in an on-stage demonstration. Click here for full story
29 March 2007
Intel attempts to steal Barcelona’s thunder with the announcement of its Penryn processors. The 45nm, dual-die processors will use just 80W, compared to Barcelona’s 95W, when they appear in the second half of 2007. Click here for full story
12 April 2007
AMD’s technical director, Giuseppe Amato, tells journalists that Barcelona will appear at the “beginning of the second half” of the year – suggesting a July release. The desktop chip would appear at “the end” of the year, he adds. Click here for full story
24 July 2007
A major motherboard manufacturer tells PC Pro that the performance gain of Barcelona “is not that obvious”. Click here for full story
6 September 2007
Intel launches quad-core Xeon 7300 series in what looks like a pre-emptive strike against the Barcelona launch, just a week later. Click here for full story
10 September 2007
Barcelona finally arrives as AMD takes the wraps off the industry’s first native quad-core processors with launch events in San Francisco and, predictably, Barcelona. Click here for full story
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