AMD: Barcelona based on customer feedback

AMD designed Barcelona, its soon-to-be launched quad-core processor, based on feedback gathered from its customers, says a senior executive.

"AMD has been a customer-centric innovation company for a long time. Essentially, we build products that solve customers' day-to-day real problems," said Tan See Ghee, AMD's South Asia technology director, in a media briefing held in Singapore on Thursday.

Tan highlighted four design goals centered around its customers' feedback.

The first goal was to have a consistent platform and road map. "This was the first thing that we heard from [customers]," Tan said, noting that manufacturers today cannot afford to introduce new products without planning for the future.

"You have to worry about the platform and also the road map that will bring [you] from the current [product] to tomorrow's product," he said. "So, what we have done, from a design goal, was to minimise the back-end changes and the transition costs, and have processors that will provide a very clear migration path."

The second goal was to ensure seamless upgradeability. AMD's customers did not want to go through a "very disruptive upgrading path", which would include having to change to a new chipset or vendor.

Tan explained that these changes "will give rise to higher costs", and more importantly, pose support problems. "Today, the IT personnel may be very familiar with a certain platform or a certain chipset, [but] if they have to migrate to a new platform entirely, this will give rise to... support costs," he explained.

The third design goal related to power and thermals. "We listened to customers by offering a next-generation product at the same, if not lower, power than the current generation," Tan said.

"This becomes a very clear and immediate advantage, because you expect the next-generation product to [have] better performance," he said. "If [it] can be maintained at the same power or a lower power [level], obviously, you'll be able to do more work for less [power]."

AMD customers also wanted a fully scalable product with no bottlenecks. "[This is] because, today, when you design a product, be it a server or desktop, it's very important to look at the scalability, [and] also whether there are bottlenecks in the systems," he said.

"There's no point having very fast building blocks in a certain segment, [while] the rest of the system has a bottleneck [due to] some limitations in the system design," Tan added.

After months of speculation, AMD announced that it would start selling its Barcelona quad-core chips in August this year, confirming rumours of a delay.

The first models will be available in standard- and low-power versions, and will run at clock frequencies of up to 2GHz, while a higher-power version will only be out in the fourth quarter of this year. The first servers using the Barcelona chips will start shipping in September.