I just hope this doesn't turn out be another underachiever like the Radeon 2900XT GPUs. We certainly need the competition, and it has been a long time since AMD-ATI delivered.

So far AMD is the superior chipset as far as what I do for a living. Here is an actual production result:

Intel Xeon Dual Cores at 2.8 GHz (total 4 cores) was able to handle 68 concurrent users based on a full regression test with 2.2 second average response time.

AMD Opterons at 2.8 GHz (total 4 cores) was able to handle 164 concurrent users on the identical regression scripts with 1.16 second average response time. And the real kicker was the AMD server was 1/2 the cost with an identical support contract.

Where I am at where we deal with hundreds of thousands of transactions a day the performance mentrics are vastly different then, say, a desktop environment and that is where AMD is still strong. The rise and fall of the desktop market isn't what processor companies thrive on. Desktop processors are akin to sport cars where server processors are more like pickup trucks and then there is IBM with the farm tractor processor lineup.

I've put together a gaming rig out of opterons and the performance was lousy for the cost. Same with xeons. Quad core processors for a desktop is about as exciting as watching goldfish... Even with processor allocation\affinity management the only thing I can actually pin the processors with is Folding@Home or a Prime searching tool.

My crappy X2 with WoW, Anti-Virus, Diskeeper, AutoGK, and Adaware all running at the same time doesn't pin the processor (when I say pin I don't mean 100% utilization, I mean pinning such the the command queue is so deep that the processor can't keep up with the context switching, IO, etc.. )

In other words the processor never is too busy to have good latency\responsiveness. I can't still ALT-TAB and move about the system without waiting 5 minutes for the system to respond. 4 Cores I doubt will make much of an impact as the rest of the system is so bottlenecked.

Case in point:

With Anti-virus and anti-spyware scans running, either 1 at a time or both at a time the CPU will never get pinned as disk IO is the bottleneck.

With most games paralell programming is not a viable option so only 1 core is really going to get any seriosu usage.

Places where 4 core come to the rescue:

Virtualized Servers and Environments. Hands down. Rather then using Fast User Switching, just give each users their own virtual server and allocate processors to it.

blah blah blah I'll shut up now my hands hurt...

Am I the only one here that wants to print that picture and hang it on the wall?

Truely amazing (from a 'Look how far we've come' perspective, not an 'OMG! I can tell from the pic that it's an Intel-Killer!!1')

I know Penryn vs Phenom is the matchup that matters for enthusiasts, but really this something of a sideshow as far as AMD is concerned. The market that's going to decide their fate is servers, because that's where they have the most (potential) relative advantage and that's where the margins are. You can see that focus all over the 10h design: the extensible L3, the added ccHT link, the improved virtualization features like nested page tables, even the shared L2. Heck, the fact it's a "true" quadcore is really only an advantage in the server market (at least today), and won't help them keep yields up the way Intel's packaging approach does.

AMD has to compete in the desktop market, of course, and hang with Intel on price and performance, but they're going to do it with a knocked-down server chip (and hey, it worked with the Opteron); Intel, meanwhile, is competing with what amounts to a stepped-up mobile chip. It's a fascinating contrast of design philosophy, which makes for an interesting contest. And given the Intel's fab and process advantage, an uphill one for AMD.

But if AMD can keep their big server OEMs like Sun and HP happy on the performance front, and especially if this design makes 8S x86servers a viable option rather than an expensive curiosity, they've got a shot.

I wish they would put a U.S. American Quarter next to it so I know how big it is ...

I can see some UVD on there. It's in between the blue and the orange bit.

At least the silicon exists.

Now we have to wait for it come across benches. ;)

Be sure to blow up the picture. Wow.

AMD or Intel for that matter, for me pictures like this always are cause for pause so as to still experience awe in the beauty and elegance of microprocessing technology. I'm old enough to still remember pictures of the original ICs back in the 1960s (published in newspapers at the time) and experiencing awe at that time.

I hope AMD does really well. We need a vibrant AMD IMHO.

Can I have a squeegee for my LCD please? There's uhm... stuff on it.

I'm just a tiny bit tired of everyone blaming the rather less than steller performance of the 2900 on AMD. That chip was a done deal before AMD got involved. If the R700 sucks then start bashing AMD for that.

AMD's 'real' business certainly needs a good shot in the arm and I think they will get it with they're server side K10s.

--SuperSpy: Hell yeah! I'd love a super hi-res version of that core that could be printed say 5ft by 5ft and framed... that would be so kewl.

Considering AMD's almost as silent as Matrox was back when we all had high hopes for them (after G200->G400), I'm more than a bit worried to be honest.

Especially after the was-to-be-glorious combined launch of Barcelona + R600 that was said to be part of the grand plan. They should've stuck to that, IMO. R600 could've used more driver time and a whole wide-spectrum market launch woulda been glorious, indeed.

Of course, the assumption of R600 getting better with more driver tweaking requires the silicon to not just be a hopeless disaster of bad decisions and/or bugs. Considering it's been feature-complete since probably 2005, I'm a bit skeptical to be honest. Heck, they've had working silicon to develop drivers on for many months.

The Radeon X2900 will stop sucking as soon as they have the 65nm version ready. That should be available within the next 6 months or so.

Well, it's prettier, but visually it's not showing us anything different from the Barcelona shots that have been around for a while, eg RWT:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT051607033728&p=8

A 10h is a 10h; the lack of ccHT isn't going to show up in a picture.

But it is a pretty picture.

Any idea what the price of admission is?

I really do hope that it competes well with Intel's offerings. We need two players back in the market. Same with nVidia and ATI.