George Ou from ZDNet posted a scathing review of not just the Barcelona benchmarks but also AMD's ethics.
He outright calls them dishonest. I've been saying for some time now that AMD is spending too much time trying to PRtheir way out of the mess they're in instead of focusing on execution.
Once again Hector and his boys - stop focusing on bringing Intel down. Focus on building and bringing to market innovative and reliable technology. Forget the 30% market share. Focus on doing the right thing for your shareholders.
With the sad results emerging for Barcelona until AMD can scale the MHz, it looks like this year is going to be a total wash out for them. And if Penryn can ensure Intel maintains the performance lead then I don't see any hope for AMD even in 2008 unless they can bring Fusion to market successfully. It's time for them to get back their focus - kill the peripheral projects and have laser focus on their bread and butter.
UPDATE
AMD has removed the benchmarks and replaced it with some marketing pooh pah.
Hat's off to George - and to the power the Internet gives individuals.
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18 comments:
"...AMD even in 2008 unless they can bring Fusion to market successfully."
AMD has publicly acknowledged that Fusion will now be 2009 at the earliest - I'll look for the link.
Poor amd
AMD to remove deceptive Barcelona benchmarks on website
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=569#comments
Here's a newer one:
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2193610/amd-promises-honest-barcelona
You keep forgetting AMD wouldn't have to lie had Intel not abused their monopoly power and lied first. You know the "two wrongs make a right" philosophy?!?
(Hey Hector, our products are behind now so I should also attempt to ring the monopoly bell at every chance I can get and use that as an excuse for anything that is wrong or doesn't go well, right?)
Our clockspeeds would be better if not for Intel's monopolistic abuses!
We would have 45mn out by now with High K, had it not been for Intel illegally leveraging their monopoly!
My 15Mil compensation package would've been much better had I not been under the thumb of Intel's monopoly....
with the way barcelona is coming along, i would think the entire lifecycle of barcelona will be a washout. too little too late, but too early on the node.
AMD have removed those false benchmarks from their site and replaced it with this marketing speech:-
For some, there is simply no substitute for pure performance. Enterprise workloads have become heavier and more complex than ever before, and modern applications in virtualized environments can demand the most from x86 processor designs.
‘‘Barcelona’’ processors have been designed to take enterprises to the next level of performance. A powerful combination of next-generation innovations and AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture leaves enterprises in control.
Each of the four computing cores, for instance, now boasts an upgraded 128-bit unit for floating point math. With twice as many cores and twice the width for instruction execution, ‘‘Barcelona’’ processors can offer up to four times the floating-point math capabilities of Second-Generation AMD Opteron processors. For High-Performance Computing and technical application customers that can translate into blazing performance.
The ‘‘Barcelona’’ story continues with its upgraded cache architecture. An L2 cache is dedicated to each core, rather than shared among cores, to help improve performance on “heavy duty” enterprise applications like databases and virtualized environments. "Barcelona" also has a shared L3 cache for the first time in AMD64 processors. This additional layer of cache can speed access to commonly-used data and provide high-speed memory for large datasets.
Come on folks - in time Barcelona will likely be a fair server product especially when considering power. This is of course assuming AMD is able to hit their indicated speeds and eventually migrate it to 45nm to get better power #'s.
Granted it doesn't look like it will be in the upper performance category (esp 1P and 2P systems) anytime soon, but it should do fine in 4P+ and more power sensitive (lower margin?) 1P and 2P areas.
The big question will be how good can AMD get this to yield given it's large die size and need to be price competitive with Intel's offerings. It doesn't look like AMD can set the market price on these chips as they look to be at best comparable to Intel offerings (meaning AMD will be tied to whatever pricing Intel sets)
On desktop unless they can get dual cores clocking real high, K10 may be a bit of a bust (esp for enthusiast space). The desktop folks that are buying quad core chips don't generally put power #1 on their priority list, so unless AMD makes some killer dual cores (either high speed or much lower power) than I don't see K10 being a Core2 killer in the desktop arena.
Come on folks - in time Barcelona will likely be a fair server product especially when considering power.
"in time" meaning, when? Mid 2008? The bulk of the 'server' market these days are the 2 socket systems.
Barcelona is not competitive on 2 sockets and AMD has multiple distractions in flight: NVDA, INTC, Opti, and other lawsuits, restructuring.
AMd does not have any time.
Fair is not good enough. Fair in time is even worse. AMD needed to hit this out of the ballpark. It appears they have failed to do what they needed to.
By the time Barcelona becomes good enough, Intel will not be standing still and Penryn and then Nehalem will make good enough obselete.
In light of the major reassessment of what Barcelona will offer and when it will be available, what is supporting the stock price of AMD?
Read these two posts:
http://sharikou180.blogspot.com/2007/05/it-boggles-mind.html
http://sharikou180.blogspot.com/2007/05/it-boggles-mind-part-2.html
I did, but I don't believe that kind of manipulation is effective for more than a day or two.
Why wouldn't it be possible...when 65% of all outstanding shares are held by financial institutions and mutual funds.
Well, because unless there is a pretty vast conspiracy, they are all competing for the best price both short and long and this is a pretty risky stock from my point of view. The only thing that makes sense is that it is being supported by buy-out speculation.
Share price is being propped up by the desire of the analysts who have been blowing the AMD trumpet for so long that their street cred is at risk if they bomb AMD now. The latest story they're spinning is Barcelona is irrelevant to the AMD story...kind of different to what they were saying about it a few months ago.
It's also being propped up by the institutional guys who bought high and now cannot sell low.
The share will take a dive only when things get so bad that the ordinary investor starts to leave the ship. And most of those folks are still hoping AMD the current disaster is a short term thing. It will take another couple of quarters of sinking revenue and accumulating losses before these guys start to lose their nerve. Once they do, then only will the guys on the Street start to sell. Because they'll know the suckers have left and they sure as hell aren't going to be buying each other's dog poop.
Do you think Wall Street is a bunch of upright citizens who only trade based on what we see in the news and heaven forbid...are completely oblivious to what their cronies across the road are doing.
The buy out story is old news. At current prices, AMD is not going to be bought by any private equity guy who knows what he's doing. I dealt with this earlier in one of my posts.
No offense, but I've never met a money manager who waits for Joe Investor to give him a sell signal. Besides if AMD stock is largely in the hands of institutions and funds, the little guy has little influence. I don't think managers care about anything except making a buck, so holding on to a losing story makes little sense when the story keeps getting worse. Frankly, the buyout rationale isn't convincing to me either. So I'm left with my original question: what's supporting the stock on a day when UBS says that AMD is getting it's clock cleaned?
None taken - but I think you misunderstood my comment. It's the other way around. Joe Investor is waiting for Wall Street to give th sell signal and Wall Street can continue to prop up the stock right now until AMD's has several quarters of financial bad news. Remember - AMD has dropped from 40 to 14 over the last year. The question is why didn't the bottom fall out after their disastrous Q1. Again...one quarter is not enough to sink the stock price when there are vested interests with millions at stake.
And for every UBS who says sell - there are people like my friend Doug Freedman at ATR who is still saying buy.
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