AMD Begins Barcelona Shipping With 15,000 to One Customer
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Later today, the AMD quad core Barcelona chip will be launched officially. Already AMD has a major client in the Texas Advanced Computing Center, as the builders there have purchased 15,000 Barcelona chips for the upcoming supercomputer called Ranger.
The chips, working in unison, are expected to turn out in excess of 500 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second), from a system with 63,000 total cores. The physical makeup will include Sun Blade 6000 servers, each with 4 processors (16 cores total).
The debut tonight looks auspicious, as many industry pundits have already given their blessing to the Barcelona design concepts. Although not not clocking as high as the Intel equivalents, the AMD is expected to do more work per cycle, and will be ratcheted up in speed as the fabs get rolling. Also noted is the superior memory architecture of the AMD product.
If the AMD plan works, it will be recapturing most of the share of server computing it had lost to Intel when that company launched its current line of quad core processors. This will give it some breathing room to again put a new top dog on the desktop.
Tags: amd, barcelona, texas advanced computing center, ranger, sun, launch event