Subject: Barca late

Sorry I've never interacted with the Inquirer before so I don't know if the "Author Flame" was the best route to do this but the link was at the bottom of the article and I'm lazy (hence this run on sentence) but I have some insight on why the AMD Barces are late. Now mind you if anyone asks I'm not an official source and this information is wild, very lucky, spot on, conjecture made by one of your anomalous readers. I wasn't going to ever say anything about it and now that it's water under the bridge I don't feel to bad about it but I really thought the info would come out of another source and it is just making my skin crawl every time I read wild assumptions or just the plain lack of truth about the subject. Right, I'll get to the point now. AMD's newest fab was supposed to be a ground up build for 65nm wafer production. However due to skyrocketing demand for Athlons at the time, things changed. Several factors were taken into consideration, by AMD, such as the grossly underestimated time line and threat of Intel's (now dubbed) core architecture and the fact that they could shave several months off the production start up time at Fab 36 if they were to start at 90nm instead of 65nm. This decision was a heated and very openly contested debated among AMD execs which I'm sure everyone will agree should have been contested until it was rescinded. While the conversion of the facility to a 65nm process was fairly quick in coming it was still detrimental to the Barcelona's birth date. Full scale spinup work for the new chip could not begin until 65nm production was fully up and running. Even after the implementation of the new 65nm process was complete AMD management struck again. To increase output to satisfy demand of then current Athlon cores, mainstream partial die shrinks were fast tracked for the A64 and given priority over the Barcelona startups. While a lot of work was done during this time frame on Barce, the partial die shrink from 90nm to 65nm of the A64s was given more resources. All told the sad end product was at least a 4 month delay in the Barcelona launch. Bad decisions were only to blame in this instance not production/architecture problems. Well that and all the AMD fans complaining that Dell didn't sell AMD CPUs. In fact if people didn't love AMD so much back then and didn't buy so many CPUs they would of had a competitive product for almost half a year now. ;)

Cheers,

Dano