AMD shows off Barcelona server chips, garners mixed reviews

With Intel giving its shareholders some awfully great news to savor over the holidays, AMD had to hit back with some news of its own, but you'll definitely get a different vibe from reading ExtremeTech's take on the firm's recently showcased Barcelona than from the horse's own mouth. While AMD parades its 65nm chip as "the world's first native quad-core x86 server processor," and boasts about its "significant advancements in performance per watt capabilities," we've reason to wonder if things aren't a bit sugarcoated. While the wafer was demonstrated as utilizing "all 16 cores" and being a seamless upgrade from "dual-core to quad-core", hard facts (read: the much anticipated benchmarks) were curiously absent. Aside from injecting onlookers with more of the same technical minutiae we've seen over the past few months, AMD didn't exactly flesh out a lot of new details to chew on, but ExtremeTech's reference system "was the loudest they'd ever had in their office," and sucked down nearly 600 watts of power with just two HDDs and a single graphics card. So while we're firmly withholding judgment until its officially released, we'd say AMD still has a bit of tweaking to do before the competition rolls in.

UPDATE: Looks like we mistook the quad-core Opteron and the Quad FX (announced on the same day, nonetheless) chips as one in the same, when (thankfully) they're not, but those eying the recently-released FX-based desktops may want to think about how much noise they're willing to put up with before throwing down on a new machine.

Read - AMD Press Release
Read - ExtremeTech's Hands-on Testing

[fruitbag @ Dec 1st 2006 2:18AM]

Umm, I think you're confusing two different parts here. AMD is talking about their future quad-core part, while ExtremeTech benchmarked their 4x4 Quad FX platform, which is two dual-core CPUs in two sockets. I don't think anyone has gotten their hands on the quad-core stuff yet.

[fruitbag @ Dec 1st 2006 2:20AM]

Not to mention this is a 65nm part, but there are no 65nm AMD CPUs in the wild (the Quad FX is 90nm).

[morfinx @ Dec 1st 2006 4:00AM]

Yeah wow, completely different parts! Barcelona is based on the upcoming K8L core, where as the QuadFX is based on the existing K8 core.

[Martin @ Dec 1st 2006 4:28AM]

I'm beginning to wonder about the people who post on Engadget. At least, about the person who wrote the above article.

[Robert @ Dec 1st 2006 6:04AM]

i hope they are able to catch Intel because the "4x4" was a joke in my opinion they would have to be 100$'s less (than the competing Intel) in my opinion before i would by one because i would have to buy two after market coolers to cool them. just my opinion...

[PEZ @ Dec 1st 2006 7:41AM]

When all you use is AMD, this type of news reporting benchmark stuff is irrelevant.

[Kevin @ Dec 1st 2006 9:33AM]

Yeah can we get a correction on this post - it's just 100% inaccurate.

[Christian Martin @ Dec 1st 2006 10:01AM]

I'm not sure I understand all the scoffing at increased power consumption. Isn't this historically a natural trend? Kilowatt PSUs are available already and have been for a bit; I think it's natural to have to up the ante where supplied juice is concerned. I welcome corrections or opinions to the contrary, though, as I'll admit a lack of education on this matter.