AT Barcelona previews are up

[SickBeast]

Link straight to 'Phenom' benchmarks

Link to Barcelona server review

IMO the chips are huge disappointments. They essentially match the intel chips that have been out for ages, clock-for-clock. There are a few exceptions, but just as many cases where the intel chips beat them.

I don't know how AMD is going to survive if it costs them more to make a core than intel, and they have to now engage in a price war. It took them years to make this core, only to gain 15% over K8.

Hopefully a new platform and higher clockspeeds will help, but I'm not holding my breath.

One of the systems crashed, too. Not good...

 

[DuceGT]

The Phenom is running off a Server board.
Registered DDR2 667 is slow.
+15% at this point isn't shabby by any means.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: DuceGT
The Phenom is running off a Server board.
Registered DDR2 667 is slow.

Registered DDR2 isn't that slow. Or weren't you aware that AMD chips have an on-die memory controller?

+15% at this point isn't shabby by any means.

Yeah, it is, when it's only 11.6% faster than a K8. The only reason they said ~15% faster, is because of the slower RAM. That means that it's still slower than a Kentsfield or Conroe, even clock for clock.

 

[bdobz]

I'm not sure I'd say it's a huge disappointment - on the one hand, even if they were equal across the board, having competition results in a win for the consumer because of price wars. Secondly, the area I'm mostly concerned with is FP-heavy HPC codes, and here it looks like the Barcelona platform shines. As always, one must always benchmark their own applications, but things look interesting so far!

... And seeing a 2.5Ghz chip is good news. From everything we've seen, the core design is fine, it's ramping that's the catch. If they can do that, all is well. Look at K8 - I have some running at 1.4 Ghz, but I can buy some now running at more than twice that. If we can get K10 up to more than twice the 1.9 Ghz speed within a reasonable time, I'd do cartwheels.

I didn't expect K10 to wipe the floor with Intel's latest and greatest, but the fact that it IS competitive in the areas I'm interested in is fantastic, especially since I was beginning to feel somewhat worried in the past few days.

 

[MDme]

Barcelona is really more of a server chip. Just look at the AT review, it's around 20-25% faster than clovertown (in most disciplines) and loses by about 5-10% to intel on certain benchmarks (some of which are heavily intel optimized). It scales better too which will negate that small deficit as the core/chip count goes up. It is also very power efficient. The only question now is the clock scaling issue and AMD may be able to hold off intel in the server space....at least.

On the desktop, yeah those benches don't seem to be that impressive. But anyway, this means that you buy what works best for you.

If AMD can tweak phenom a bit coupled with higher clocks, it will at least be closer to C2D.

 

[rmed64]

Originally posted by: myocardia

Originally posted by: DuceGT
The Phenom is running off a Server board.
Registered DDR2 667 is slow.

Registered DDR2 isn't that slow. Or weren't you aware that AMD chips have an on-die memory controller?

+15% at this point isn't shabby by any means.

Yeah, it is, when it's only 11.6% faster than a K8. The only reason they said ~15% faster, is because of the slower RAM. That means that it's still slower than a Kentsfield or Conroe, even clock for clock.

I think in the most important area to me (gaming, duh) 16% and 21% faster in oblivion and HL2 is a pretty big jump.

The chips will be competitive with Intel chips, which will cause more price wars and quad cores to become more inexpensive shortly.

Everyone wins.

 

[Greenman]

I figured it wasn't anything special based on AMD's silence. It looks to me like AMD is going back to the days of being second best.

 

[CrystalBay]

Well at least they almost have caught up, with a power envelope that is much less...

 

[CrystalBay]

Pebkac, DP damn Kaspersky/// HTPC owners will be liking it.

 

[Deliximus]

i am not disappointed at all. they are kicking ass in the server dept where it will hurt intel the most against the Xeon.

As long as they get the clockspeed up and close enough to intel, they will be ok. They just have to price accordingly.

 

[Deliximus]

i am not disappointed at all. they are kicking ass in the server dept where it will hurt intel the most against the Xeon.

As long as they get the clockspeed up and close enough to intel, they will be ok. They just have to price accordingly.

 

[Sunrise089]

Personally it looks really good in the server space. Didn't you guys catch Anand's comment that "they have known it would be strong in the server market for a while" - he wouldn't say something so conclusive if he didn't think it was pretty darn good. Considerably outperforming Intel clock-for-clock, having a good chance of large near-term speed increases, and scaling very well is a pretty good way to start the new server battle.

Now on the desktop space, the numbers don't look as good, and the pricing/business side is pretty bad, BUT you do have the above points in favor of Phenom (clock-for-clock speed, rapid speed improvements, and great scaling) plus the possibility of better memory performance and the fact that a very immature platform has lots of potential room for improvement. I don't think it will be a Phenom killer, but it looks to me that the early '08 picture will be pretty close if AMD can hit 3.0ghz by then.

PS - Also remember that much of the market looks at performance-per-watt, even on the desktop for HTPC apps and the like. In that space, as this architecture ramps up in speed, it looks like it's going to be VERY competitive.

 

[coldpower27]

Not bad, Barcelona looks to be shaping to do fairly well in the Server space, better most likely as the clockspeed ramps up. Things are interesting again.

 

[Stoneburner]

So, it's good for the server market, not so good at the desktop market. Considering i'm part of the desktop market, looks like I'll get getting Penryn.

 

[IntelUser2000]

i am not disappointed at all. they are kicking ass in the server dept where it will hurt intel the most against the Xeon.

Intel just released Tigerton MP and Clarksbro chipset with significantly improved performance i n the MP.

In a month or so, Harpertown with Seaburg chipset will be introduced.

They will not be doing bad as people predict now.

 

[JackPack]

Barcelona as a consumer chip looks disappointing, whether it's gaming or media encoding.

Barcelona for server apps looks reasonable, but the low clock speed means low ASPs. Since 45nm Harpertown/Yorkfield and 1600 MHz FSB are coming soon, there's really no reason for AMD to celebrate.

 

[konakona]

I think in the most important area to me (gaming, duh) 16% and 21% faster in oblivion and HL2 is a pretty big jump.

The chips will be competitive with Intel chips, which will cause more price wars and quad cores to become more inexpensive shortly.

Everyone wins.

dunno, seeing how it costs more to produce these chips, the picture is unclear at best IMO.
16%~21% jump is significant, but not enough to trounce peryn. Lets just keep our fingers crossed and hope for the difference between the server and desktop chip would make it a more potent (higher clockspeed, maybe) platform.

 

[JackPack]

Originally posted by: konakona
dunno, seeing how it costs more to produce these chips, the picture is unclear at best IMO.
16%~21% jump is significant, but not enough to trounce peryn.

It's not even enough to trounce Kentsfield. Compared to K8 Quad FX, Kentsfield had a 30-50% lead in those games.

 

[Sylvanas]

Good stuff IMO, the 2.5ghz Barc is 16% faster than the 2.0ghz barcelona in gaming which is already 21% faster than the Opterons. By the time Phenom hits @ close to 2.6ghz without the limitation of DDR667 as in the review, I hope to see a kick ass chip

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: Sylvanas
Good stuff IMO, the 2.5ghz Barc is 16% faster than the 2.0ghz barcelona in gaming which is already 21% faster than the Opterons. By the time Phenom hits @ close to 2.6ghz without the limitation of DDR667 as in the review, I hope to see a kick ass chip

That's what I'm hoping too.

AMD need their Phenoms up to 2.8GHz - 3.2 GHz if they want to compete in the desk top arena. Though if we do see one at 2.8GHz anytime soon we will see how it really scales in performance. At 2.8 it might actually kill a Core Duo/Penyrn. Though we'll just have to wait and see if the "super charger" simile is true.

The 140% increase in SSE performance was a good breath of fresh air but in all honesty AMD should of improved the front-end of the K8 a long time ago. The Barc should of been out before the first Pentium M hit a mobile unit.

I wasn't expecting a whole lot from the evolutionary improvements AMD made. The really need a new re-design if they expect to "trounce" Intel's latest offerings. SledgeHammer will have to come out and compete against Nethlem. And hopefully SledgeHammer will be a little more competitive in Integer performance. K8 has reached it's limits, but I do believe they can get a lot more performance out of their SSE, Cache, and Memory Controller if they decide to do incremental upgrades on the Barc which I think is their only choice until Sledgehammer arrives.

 

[DuceGT]

AMD has on-board memory controllers! No way!
Registered DDR2 is a bottleneck well worth mentioning when it comes to applications like gaming. We also don't know how the new HTT link will turn out.

 

[JackPack]

Given that Barcelona has a 2MB L3, I doubt DDR2-800 will result in any appreciable difference.

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: DuceGT
AMD has on-board memory controllers! No way!
Registered DDR2 is a bottleneck well worth mentioning when it comes to applications like gaming. We also don't know how the new HTT link will turn out.

It'll be faster, but then it'll also be going up against C2Ds freed from FB-DIMMs and the mediocre 5000 chipset.

 

[Griswold]

Funny situation. Now we have certain guys who are already defending their favourite company by predicting how awesome Tigerton/Clarksboro and later on, even awesomer(!), Harpertown/Seaburg will be compared to the new Opterons. And it wont be long until we see AMD fans predicting what AMD will do to further advance Phenom to match the competition - which it does not quite do right now, from all we know. Though, slapping a 8800 GTX on a server board with a 2.5GHz Barcelona sample using registered DDR2-667 isnt exactly what I call meaningful. But we'll see in december.

But one thing nobody can deny is: the HPC crowd will embrace, kiss and love their new (non-IBM) masters from sunnyvale - thats at least something, isnt it?.

 

[brxndxn]

The benchmarks look really nice as far as I'm concerned.. AMD's offerings are priced significantly lower than Intel's in terms of price/performance and AMD's offerings have a bonus of lower energy cost. Plus, Intel's configurations have already been tweaked and there has been no tweaking or recompiling for AMD's yet.. So, we'll be seeing AMD's performance improve.

As far as the 'simulated' gaming benchmark, I'm not sure Anandtech is even being fair to AMD at that point. In the past, we've seen things as small as a bios update affect performance by more than 10%. If you get 15% better performance out of a server Barcelona that is being choked in every which way (ie.. slow memory, not tweaked or optimized), you can expect the Phenom will be significantly faster than 15% better for gaming..

It all looks very promising to me..