Remember AMD Barcelona? Delayed and disappointing, the architecture behind AMD’s first Phenom chips finally turned up in November 2007, six months behind schedule, with performance that left us “a little underwhelmed” after months of anticipation – and that’s before it was compared against its Intel equivalents.

At the same time, Intel was preparing to release its Wolfdale-based Core 2 Duo processors, which appeared in January 2008 using the more efficient 45nm architecture – a key improvement over AMD’s 65nm chips. The result? Our review concluded that the new Core 2 Duo E8000-series “wipes the floor with the [older] E6000 series” and that Intel’s new processors were an “unqualified success”.

Fast forward three years, and the similarities are startling.

The chips are down

Intel has recently unleashed its stunning Sandy Bridge architecture, which combines improved efficiency with markedly improved performance over its predecessors. The launch might have been marred by the firm’s well-publicised SATA problems, but they’ve now been fixed.

AMD, in the meantime, is floundering: its latest processors are retooled versions of old hardware, and forthcoming Bulldozer chips look like they’ll have an uphill battle, too. AMD is in second place when it comes to implementing 32nm manufacturing, with Bulldozer-based desktop processors not due until later this year and laptop parts only slated to arrive in 2012.

And then there are Bulldozer’s headline features, many of which sound awfully familiar. The chips will be built around individual modules that contain two processing cores with Multi-Threading and Turbo Core technologies, so they’ll be able to address two tasks independently and overclock at will, too – so the firm’s top-end consumer chips will include four modules with eight cores.

Bulldozer might not be as efficient as Intel’s chips, either. AMD’s new chips will have a maximum TDP of 125W, with Intel’s most powerful Sandy Bridge chips coming in with a top TDP of only 95W. That suggests great power efficiency, less heat, and more overclocking headroom.

By the time AMD releases its first Bulldozer-powered processors – rumoured to be in the summer – Intel’s latest Core i7 Extreme chips will also be on the horizon with eight cores and, consequently, 16-thread support as standard, and using a more efficient manufacturing process. They’ll likely be more expensive than AMD’s priciest Bulldozers but, if recent form is to be believed, they’ll also be far quicker, further establishing Intel as the chip of choice for the enthusiast.

The picture isn’t much rosier in AMD’s previous stronghold at the budget end of the market. Fusion is taking aim at Atom but, even though we’ve found it to be a better performer than its rival, we’re not exactly enthused about its prospects. Our review described it as “a year too late” to make a real impact. The desktop chips still aren’t due for several months, and the sheen that surrounded netbooks back in 2007 has faded as CULV laptops, smartphones and tablets – all of which are powered by non-AMD technology – have gained in prominence.

Nvidia fights back

At least AMD has spent the past couple of years delivering market-leading graphics cards, with the firm often finding the perfect balance between price and performance. The tide’s starting to turn here, though, with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 460 and its successor, the GTX 560 Ti, proving to be better prospects than AMD’s own HD 6950, HD 6970 and HD 6870.

The firms are now trading blows in the high-end space, too, although Nvidia’s likely got the edge here, with its GTX 570 offering the “best compromise between cost and power”. And, while AMD currently holds performance records thanks to the new HD 6990, Nvidia is rumoured to be releasing its own dual-GPU card in the next few weeks – so you’d be wise to hold off if you’re thinking about dropping such a vast sum of cash on a graphics card.

There’s turmoil at the top, too. January saw the departure of CEO Dirk Meyer, allegedly because of the firm’s failure to capitalise on the growth of mobile devices, and other key staff left not long after, with COO Bob Rivet and senior vice president of corporate strategy Marty Seyer both announcing their resignations at the start of February.

In the meantime, AMD has appointed a couple of new faces to its board of directors. Henry Chow and Nicholas M. Donofrio, both veterans of IBM, bring plenty of chip-designing experience to the table – but, crucially, Meyer hasn’t been replaced, with Thomas Seifert manning the fort until a permanent CEO is appointed. That can’t come soon enough – while Meyer has an engineering background and personally led the team that developed the Athlon processor, Seifert is a manager with less technical expertise.

It’s a bleak picture. AMD doesn’t lead the way in any area at the moment, and few signs point to this situation improving. Beating rivals such as Intel and Nvidia might be one step too far for the Californian company right now – by the looks of things, it’ll have a hard enough time trying to keep up.

This prompted one commenter (giving his name as Wilbert3) to raise an insightful point. Hyper-Threading is great for everyday multi-tasking: for example, it lets a dual-core Core i5 CPU service four concurrent processes. But it works by presenting each core’s spare execution capacity to the OS as a virtual second core. Under heavy load, where there is no spare capacity, it would seem unable to offer any benefit. In such cases we shouldn’t expect to see a Core i5 achieve performance anywhere near what a true quad-core architecture would provide.

That analysis sounds persuasive, but is it borne out by the evidence?

To find out, I’ve done some tests on our standard Core i7-920 test rig, using our highly parallel 3D rendering benchmark and selectively disabling physical and virtual cores. Here are the results, in seconds, showing how long it took to render the same scene in different CPU configurations:

For the record, this was tested on a 32-bit Vista Home Premium installation, running at 2.66GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1066 RAM and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard disk.

Clearly, Hyper-Threading does help, cutting the dual-core render time for our test scene from 185 seconds to 165 seconds. It seems even highly parallel tasks waste some execution capacity that Hyper-Threading can exploit. But when we switched off Hyper-Threading and stepped up to four physical cores, render time was slashed to just 118 seconds — a performance boost more than three times greater than that offered by Hyper-Threading.

(Update: At the request of some readers, I subsequently repeated the four-core test with Hyper-Threading enabled. This brought render time down to 107 seconds, representing a speed improvement of 10% — almost exactly the same proportional change, to within 1%, as observed in the two-core tests.)

The conclusion is clear: Hyper-Threading can eke some extra performance out of even the most demanding tasks, and to that extent it’s certainly a plus point for Intel’s architecture. It’s also clearly worth having if you need to service many parallel lightweight demands — in a server, for example. But when it comes to proper grunt-work, it’s no substitute for real silicon.

All-in-one PCs and Phenomenal CPUs

The Mesh Matrix II was a traditional PC, but inside sat one of AMD’s brand new Phenom II processors. We put it through its paces and it blew the old Phenoms away; it’s not up there with the recent Core i7s from Intel, but the price makes it a real competitor. The Mesh PC it came in was pretty special too, earning six stars out of six in our review. The same could not be said of the Core i7-based Dell Studio XPS 435mt, which failed to impress us at all.

We had two PCs with integrated displays, both from PC World brand Advent, both interesting in different ways. The Advent AIO100 is the company’s net-top offering, with a bigger screen and a more grown-up design than the child-like Asus Eee Top. It’s Atom-powered, so not a speed-demon, but of the short list of net-tops we’ve seen it’s the best yet.

Then we had the Advent AIO200, a larger and dearer beast at £766 plus VAT, but with plenty more to offer. It had more style than we expected, a quad-core processor and a decent spec, so it actually surprised us by being really quite appealing. Whether it could knock our current A List champion from its throne was a different question entirely, though.

Peripherals and Google

Elsewhere we saw NEC go all green with its EA261WM monitor. With a 26in screen it might be a stretch to call it one for the environmentally conscious, but a gimmicky carbon footprint calculator encourages a lower brightness setting. It’s easily ignored – and probably will be by most people – but credit to NEC for trying something. As for the screen, we liked it but not enough to recommend.

We also got to play with Google Apps Premier Edition – is now the time to ditch your powerful apps and move everything online? Short answer: No. And we saw external hard disks from Memorex and Verbatim, as well as the stylish new Pure Avanti Flow internet radio.

It’s not every day one gets to chat with senior AMD staff – especially not while they’re in such an agreeably bleary and docile state – so I took the opportunity to voice a personal opinion. I observed (perhaps a little bluntly) that it was all well and good AMD announcing new technologies for the future, but perhaps it ought also to think about promoting one of the strongest bits of technology it already has in the marketplace, viz. its Phenom X3 and X4 processors.

I know – because I’ve painstakingly tested them – that, in terms of bang per buck, the new Phenoms are very strong mid- and upper-range processors. The older models may have been lacklustre, but these are a whole different matter, putting Intel to shame at several price points. Yet they’ve entered into mass production without any fanfare, without even a whisper – hell, without so much as a press release.

So I asked Ian what the hell AMD is playing at. (All right, I didn’t put it quite like that, but I think he detected my exasperation.) After investing however many millions in bringing the Phenom up to speed, why aren’t they shouting its renaissance from the rooftops?

“The TLB bug hit us hard,” was his slightly cryptic response, referring to the notorious erratum that hobbled the performance of the original Phenoms by up to 20%.

Was he saying that the underperforming chips had had such a disastrous impact on the company’s fortunes that there was now no money to publicise the new ones? We all know AMD’s finances haven’t been in great shape lately, but from where I was sitting – in the restaurant of a four-star seafront hotel on the Côte d’Azur – it looked like the company was still able to rustle up a bit of budget when it wanted to.

It turned out he wasn’t suggesting they couldn’t afford to promote it. The problem, he felt, was public perception. “You know the bug’s gone,” he said. “And I know it’s gone. But the consumer…” He shrugged.

And that was it. This was a senior AMD product manager effectively admitting that the company considers the Phenom brand too tarnished to be worth promoting.

AMD’s reluctance to blow its own trumpet is understandable. After a disastrous 2007, in which the company’s promises repeatedly blew up in its face, it was appropriate for AMD to enter a period of self-reflection, to swallow its pride and to engage in some serious expectation management. Such was the mood as my interlocutor came in, along with Jon Carvill, as hands-on brand manager for the UK back in March, and since then the company has made a commendable stab at leaving its old ways behind. Products like the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and the Phenom X3 have appeared sooner than expected, surprising us with their power and affordability, while the company has scrupulously held back on grandiose claims and self-congratulation.

But there’s a difference between humility and self-flagellation. AMD has got so much into the habit of talking itself down that it seems to have started believing its own expectation-lowering rhetoric. Yes, the TLB bug was a big embarrassment, and thanks to it, the word “Phenom” does attract a certain ridicule among those in the know. But the company’s apparent defeatism makes no sense whatsoever.

For one thing, of the hundreds of thousands of people buying desktop PCs every year, how many have ever even heard of the TLB bug? It’s got to be an absolutely minuscule proportion. There’s a huge market out there with no preconceptions of the Phenom whom AMD could surely reach – if they’d only try.

And even if people have heard of the TLB bug, so what? New, improved versions of things come along all the time. Look at the Intel Celeron – when the first models, with no L2 cache, came out, they were universally panned. But the next generation, with its 128KB L2 cache, was happily accepted into the mainstream. Consumers don’t care about pedigrees, they want to know what’s the best chip for them right now.

And, of course, it’s my job – and that of all of us here at PC Pro – to help our readers determine that. Right now, AMD’s processor line-up is a good one, and we’re happy to recommend it. But it’s very easy to imagine Intel coming back with a new processor that knocks the Phenom off our A List. And when that happens, it seems AMD plans simply to take it on the chin.

Technology-wise, AMD has some great products, and there are more interesting ideas in the pipeline. But it seems the TLB bug really did hit hard, damaging not just AMD’s finances but also its self-confidence. To turn its fortunes around in the face of the Goliath Intel, the company needs to be out there selling the new Phenoms’ strengths to the mass market – but right now it lacks the cojones to do so. It’s time for AMD to forgive itself for past failures and get back in the game in earnest – before it’s too late.