Barcelona Architecture: AMD on the Counterattack
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 1, 2007 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Chip
Barcelona is AMD's first quad-core processor, featuring four cores on a single 65nm die. Unlike Intel's quad-core Kentsfield, Barcelona is not made up of two dual core die, which is why AMD calls it a "native" quad core solution. Although there is a technical performance advantage to AMD's approach, we're unsure if it's something that will be visible in real world testing.
Built on AMD's 65nm process, Barcelona is a more complex design than the K8 requiring a total of 11 metal layers compared to 9 for K8 and 8 for Core 2. AMD has required more metal layers at the same process generation than Intel in previous years, so Barcelona is not unique. Additional metal layers make manufacturing a bit more complicated, but there are no significant downsides to the end user.
With four cores and an optional 2MB of L3 cache on-die, Barcelona weighs in at 463 million transistors. At 463 million transistors, Barcelona is 119 million transistors shy of Kentsfield's 582M count. The lower transistor count boils down to a lack of cache; each Barcelona core has a 128KB L1 cache and a 512KB L2 cache, with all four cores sharing a 2MB L3 cache, for a total of 4.5MB of cache on-die. Each of the two die that compose a single Kentsfield have two cores, each core with its own 64KB L1 and a shared 4MB L2. A single Kentsfield chip has a total of 8.25MB of cache on-die, over 80% more than Barcelona, thus explaining the 25.6% increase in transistor count.
However, Barcelona is far more than a quad-core K8 with an L3 cache. We estimate the number of non-cache transistors in a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 to be approximately 94M, and the Barcelona core is around 247M; even doubling the dual-core K8 figure won't get you close to Barcelona. Note that simply doubling the 94M number also isn't an accurate comparison as Barcelona only features a single on-die Northbridge. In essence, there are more than 60M additional transistors (or more than 15M per core) that went into architectural enhancements outside of more cores and cache in Barcelona.
Barcelona is AMD's first quad-core processor, featuring four cores on a single 65nm die. Unlike Intel's quad-core Kentsfield, Barcelona is not made up of two dual core die, which is why AMD calls it a "native" quad core solution. Although there is a technical performance advantage to AMD's approach, we're unsure if it's something that will be visible in real world testing.
Built on AMD's 65nm process, Barcelona is a more complex design than the K8 requiring a total of 11 metal layers compared to 9 for K8 and 8 for Core 2. AMD has required more metal layers at the same process generation than Intel in previous years, so Barcelona is not unique. Additional metal layers make manufacturing a bit more complicated, but there are no significant downsides to the end user.
With four cores and an optional 2MB of L3 cache on-die, Barcelona weighs in at 463 million transistors. At 463 million transistors, Barcelona is 119 million transistors shy of Kentsfield's 582M count. The lower transistor count boils down to a lack of cache; each Barcelona core has a 128KB L1 cache and a 512KB L2 cache, with all four cores sharing a 2MB L3 cache, for a total of 4.5MB of cache on-die. Each of the two die that compose a single Kentsfield have two cores, each core with its own 64KB L1 and a shared 4MB L2. A single Kentsfield chip has a total of 8.25MB of cache on-die, over 80% more than Barcelona, thus explaining the 25.6% increase in transistor count.
However, Barcelona is far more than a quad-core K8 with an L3 cache. We estimate the number of non-cache transistors in a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 to be approximately 94M, and the Barcelona core is around 247M; even doubling the dual-core K8 figure won't get you close to Barcelona. Note that simply doubling the 94M number also isn't an accurate comparison as Barcelona only features a single on-die Northbridge. In essence, there are more than 60M additional transistors (or more than 15M per core) that went into architectural enhancements outside of more cores and cache in Barcelona.
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johnsonx - Saturday, March 3, 2007 - link
Actually that's the new Double-Dog-Dare RAM-3.JarredWalton - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
Crazy D's... they're like rabbits!AkumaX - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
Great read. I love Anand's articles. We'll see what the future holds, for both AMD and IntelMAME - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
I wonder how much market share AMD will lose until this chip become readily available.tuteja1986 - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
None... AMD will loose no marketshare. They are in bloody price war... Intel hasn't really regained any lost territory. But Intel have the advantage of performance is trying to find a breakthrough in AMD market share to retake back the lost territory. AMD is still selling everything they make but at huge looses caused by the price war.Griswold - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
Huge loses? Do you mistake the loss of Q406 due to the ATI purchase as a loss due to selling under production costs?Phynaz - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
Seen that AMD cach flow recently?TwistyKat - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
...you have people like me who won't buy anything from Intel. If we didn't have AMD to make Intel competitive we would never have the range of choices we have today. We'd all be running monster Itanics with massive electricity bills.Intel has the resources to effectively put AMD out of business over time if it so chooses, and today I suspect they are focused on something close to that.
fitten - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
Won't happen. In order to avoid anti-trust lawsuits, Intel will give AMD money to keep them afloat before they'll allow AMD to fail.
GoatMonkey - Friday, March 2, 2007 - link
If AMD were to be purchased by a larger corporation, like IBM, it would leave Intel free to beat AMD down with all of their resources. Of course, at that point AMD would have the resources of IBM behind it and could potentially fight back better.