Posted on Monday, May 07 2007 @ 11:51 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Inq
heard the performance of AMD's Barcelona processors will be better than expected:
We understand that people in Austin were 'dancing in the aisles'. When asked if that was because of B0, we were told that people are very happy, very very happy, but he had 'never heard of such a thing'.
Another source claimed the memory controller, long a bottleneck in K8 scaling, came in way better than expected.
So what do you end up with? A massive gain in frequency. How massive? Almost 500MHz. Instead of the much touted launch parts, look for five SKUs at launch, AM2 quads at 2.6GHz, 2.7GHz and 2.9GHz, a dual at 2.7GHz and a quad on socket F at 2.8GHz.
We think whoever worked this magic deserves a pat on the head, a few days off after launch, and quite possibly a raise. Twenty per cent faster out of the gate is nothing to be sneezed at. The only question that remains is what volumes AMD can deliver at these speeds.
