This week has brought a whole raft of AMD stories with all sorts of headlines swirling about the company in the run-up to next week's make-or-break Barcelona announcement. Here's a brief look at the very latest in AMD news before the big day on Monday.
Dell sticks by AMD
In a speech at the 14th Annual Citigroup Technology Conference, Dell CEO Michael Dell insisted that his company would continue offering AMD processors. Dell cited the need for diversity in processor suppliers, as well as the complementary strengths of Intel's quad-core "Clovertown" Xeons and AMD's quad-core Barcelona. Dell, who could be citing either real in-house benchmarks or someone's marketing materials, claimed that Barcelona has a 30 percent lead in floating-point performance over Clovertown, while Clovertown has a 30 percent lead in integer.
These are all good reasons to stick by AMD, but there's another factor behind Dell's newfound love of Intel's archrival that you won't be hearing about from company executives. Namely, the fact that Dell no longer gets the steep discounts and advertising subsidies that it allegedly once received from Intel when it was an Intel-only company. In the post-Conroe world, Intel has cut prices across the board for its processor lineup. So whatever discount Dell may still get, it's not worth losing any potential business over.
AMD serves up Barcelona prices
Someone in the channel squealed, and now DailyTech has its hands on the launch prices and clockspeeds for Barcelona. In line with previous announcements, Barcelona's launch speeds top out at a piddling 2.0GHz across the board, in both two- and four-socket variants. On the two-socket side, there's the 2.0GHz (95W TDP) Opteron 2350, a processor that sells for $372 (presumably in lots of 1,000). There's also a 1.9GHz 68W part for the same price, as well as a 1.7GHz (68W TDP) for $206.
