Barcelona Architecture: AMD on the Counterattack

Final Words

When Intel launched its first Core 2 based microprocessors, the performance improvement was beyond revolutionary. It was the biggest single performance improvement we had seen from a new microprocessor in several years at that point. A large part of Core 2's success was its architecture, but you cannot ignore that it couldn't have come at a better time for Intel.

All Conroe, Merom and Woodcrest had to do was outperform Intel's aging and misguided NetBurst based Pentium 4 processors. Doing so proved quite easy for AMD, which had been doing just that pretty much since the 2000 launch of the processors. With no competition from within Intel, AMD wasn't really doing that much better. While the K8 was a strong architecture, it was getting old. Without any serious performance enhancing architectural updates since its introduction back in 2003, AMD left Intel with a stationary target to aim for. With each successive iteration of the Pentium M architecture, Intel came closer and closer to developing its own Athlon 64 killer, eventually culminating in the release of such a product - the Core 2 Duo.

It wasn't some mystical force of microprocessor design prowess that allowed Intel to pull ahead last year; it was a good architecture and excellent timing. Ironically enough, it was the same two elements that orchestrated much of the success of AMD's K7 and K8 architectures; they were both good designs released at times when the competition was at its worst.

In terms of actual product releases, the first incarnation of AMD's new architecture will be found in the next-generation Opteron due out at the middle of this year. AMD will initially launch at speeds ranging from 2.1GHz to 2.3GHz, but by the end of this year you can expect higher clock speeds. On the desktop, AMD's Agena core will be a Barcelona equivalent shipping at between 2.7 - 2.9GHz. Kuma will be a dual-core variant of Agena shipping in the 2.0 - 2.9GHz range.

Barcelona will be a success for AMD; the long awaited architectural update to K8 should yield significant performance improvements, especially in current areas of weakness for the K8 (e.g. video encoding). Our review of the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ showed that with aggressive pricing, AMD could come close to offering something competitive to Intel. At current prices, we suspect that Barcelona would be enough to close the gap between AMD and Intel. Chances are that we won't see bargain basement prices on AMD's new cores, but we'd expect that AMD would have to maintain a competitive market.

The real catch here is what happens after Barcelona; as we mentioned before, Intel's current successes were born out of steady but regular evolution of a good starting architecture. With yearly updates to the Pentium M, Intel achieved a snowball effect that proved difficult to stop. It would seem that a similar approach by AMD would be necessary to avoid sticky situations like the one it finds itself in today.