What's AMD Up To? Barcelona.

So it's been driving me crazy for a while now. AMD took on a relatively high-profile when they partnered with Microsoft for the Windows Vista launch. Smart move, strategically, especially since Intel has their fingers in other pies on the Apple side of things. What was really confusing me was ... why? AMD really wasn't that big anymore when it comes to mindshare.

Talking with Chris Aarons, he said a bit about their 4x4 initiative, and how important it was to get the enthusiasts involved. This was in response to my very frank question about exactly what the heck AMD is doing. They used to be the kings in the processor space, lauded for their fantastic gaming performance, when Intel took back the crown in a bloody coup and never looked back.

In many ways, the AMD hardware is still superior, especially in how dual-cores are handled, but Intel just keeps beating the pants off of them performance-wise. So when Chris mentioned 4x4, the first thing that came to mind is, "That's all well and good, but I can't afford that!" Turns out, Chris was keeping his cards closer to his chest than I thought.

So what exactly is AMD up to? It's called Barcelona, and it's a brand-new chip design for AMD. See, part of the problem with trying to innovate in the processor space is that you're tied to the current applications and operating systems that people expect will just plain work. AMD took a long, hard look at the x86 architecture, and tried to figure out what they could reinvent while maintaining compatability. Barcelona is the answer.

Essentially a quad-core Opteron chip, Barcelona raises the bar by boosting the SSE unit (Streaming SIMD Extensions) to 128bits ... doubling them in size. And there's four of them, one per core. The SSE unit is important because they're floating-point math units, which is where AMD used to really shine. According to Infoworld, floating point performance is improved by 80 pecent over the previous Opteron. Per Core. I can hear the hardcore gamers out there salivating now.

One of the other things that's becoming a hot topic is virtualization. My other big complaint to Chris was that it's all well and good to have all of this computing power, but my trusty 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 and old ATI X800XT run everything I need just fine. I even get decent scores in Vista. Why on earth would I need to buy anything else? Well, virtualization is supposedly the answer. Virtualization is the ability to run something similar to copies of your operating system (or other operating systems) in protected memory space.

Now, that sounds kind of boring, but think of it this way ... have you ever wanted to try out some piece of software, or play around with something in your computer, but you were afraid it would break everything? That's where virtualization comes in. When you end a virtual session, it just goes away. Poof. When you load it back up again, it goes right back where it was before you started the first time. Or you can save the session if you like the results. This may not be something that the average home user would need, but as a gamer, the idea of having my main computer running all of my productivity and creation apps, and running my games in a fully-optimized virtual machine is kind of compelling. Of course, no gamer in their right mind would do this, because performance is everything. That's where Barcelona comes in ... AMD added something called nesting paging tables, and essentially, it allows you to flip between these protected virtual machines as quickly and easily as you might change the channel on your TV. As a gamer, this means that I can continue using Windows Vista as my main operating system, and when I want to play games, either fire up another copy of Vista, or load up an optimized Windows XP session. That's cool.

That's not all AMD has in its bag of tricks. Power savings is a big concern as well. The faster computers get, the more power they want, and it was kind of sickening to hear that a top-of-the-line gaming machine today needs around a 600-watt power supply to feed the video cards and main processor. Part of the reason is the archaic way processors currently save on power ... they simply throttle down the entire chip. In a dual-core machine, this doesn't work because even if you're only using one core, the other has to run at the same speed. Barcelona improves on that by slowing down only the cores that are running idle, and it does it a lot faster. But they didn't stop there ... they can also throttle individual parts of each core, so only what's currently being used is running at full-speed. That's really incredible.

Last, but certainly not least, Barcelona gives each individual core it's own Level 2 cache (on-chip memory), while Intel is still spreading the cache across their cores. Right idea, but wrong place to do it. AMD figured that out, and added a Level 3 cache that does get spread across the cores, giving the chip a place to store information that any core can access quickly.

So OK, Chris ... you guys have got my attention again. If Barcelona performs as well as expected, it could open up a whole new world of software development, similar to how HyperThreading opened up the world to "content creation" applications like making movies, photo manipulation, and CD ripping by allowing you to do a lot of those tasks in the background.

This is going to be an interesting year.