Or at least according to remarks quoted in this article:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2181150,00.asp

Was there any frustration on the company's part, or on your part, that Barcelona did not come to the market sooner?

Absolutely.

There is nothing that we would have been more excited about than getting it out earlier. But we are not making excuses. This is a damn difficult thing to do, as I'm sure you can imagine. This is the first time that any company in the world has put 600 million transistors on a chip—and you can round that off and say it's a billion.

Even leaving aside non-MPU chips like DRAM this claim is clearly false.
Intel shipped Madison 9M (592m transistors) nearly three years ago,
and Montecito (1720m transistors) and Tulsa (1328m transistors) over
a year ago.

What's even funnier is that their own material says 463 mio transistors. Maybe they should have rounded it further to include anything attached to Barcelona, like the RDDR2, southbridge, and perhaps the GPU.

Quote:

Q: What’s the die size and how many transistors does it use? A: The die size is 285mm2. The processor uses approximately 463 million transistors.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_15251_15260,00.htm

BTW, it looks like Ruiz lied twice in that interview.

According to a lot of accounts, such as this:

http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=blog&blog_id=400000040&blog_post_id=1400006940

ISSCC: Processor Plethora, Part Two

[..]

Built on a 65 nm low-k SOI process with 11 copper interconnect layers, Barcelona contains 463 million transistors and has a 283 mm2 die size.

Barcelona uses 463m transistors, not 600m as Ruiz claimed (let
alone the 67% rounding up to a billion).

Usually one needs a full generation process shrink to double the
number of transistors on a given size die but Ruiz can more than
double it with only his big mouth. ;-)

Or there was a Freudian slip and he was talking about a future 45 nm K10? :?

Separate from the original topic, what is the transistor count when disregarding cache for Montecito, Tigerton, K8 Rev F, and Barcelona?

I can't stop myself thinking that appart from the probably right remark from Paul (I mean, as far as I can judge he's probably right), that kind of remark and the way it was presented seems more like Paranoid/Who?/Alberto way of trolling.

I thought you were capable of smarter than that, Paul.

I think he simply means its a rather trite point. Compared to other misleading or incorrect statements he or AMD has made, or more generally compared to the rest of AMD's problems its just not that important. Regardless of the factual correctness of the transistor count, his basic point was that Barcelona was not simple to create and I think we can all probably agree that is true whether or not the underlying assertion of transistor count supremacy is correct or the resulting product is a good one.

Of all the ways one could beat up on AMD right now, its seems there are far more meaningful ways to do so...