AMD: Barcelona quad-core to outperform Intel Clovertown

Stan Beer
Saturday, 30 June 2007 07:31

Your IT - Home IT

Chipmaker AMD has stated that it is on track to ship its long awaited quad-core Barcelona processors in August promising "significant performance enhancements" over existing architectures. The AMD chips will be the first processors to implement four processing cores on a single die, unlike Intel's Clovertown Xeon processors which achieve four cores by bridging two dual-core processors together.

The new Barcelona processors, to be made using 65-nanometer manufacturing process, are promised to deliver a performance increase up to 70% on database applications and up to 40% on floating point applications at chip frequencies up to 2Ghz with higher frequencies up to 3Ghz promised in Q407. The chips will also be available in lower power versions.

According to AMD, there are significant advantages that four processing cores on a single die will provide over Intel's existing quad-core solution, which AMD has described as simply two dual-core processors "stitched together". AMD and Intel have in the past waged a war of words over whether the shared memory cache of Intel's implementation or the discrete cache of AMD's quad-core chips is more efficient in terms of performance and power consumption.

AMD claims that Intel's twin die quad-core solution is inherently inefficient compared to AMD's single die solution because processing cores on the new Barcelona chips each have their own discrete cache and thus will not require additional clock cycles to flush and reload memory when a request is made on a processing core.

“More than ever before, customers are expecting energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt leadership as much as absolute performance. With this new reality of computing, greater performance at the expense of greater power consumption is no longer an option,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division at AMD. “AMD has prioritized production of our low power and standard power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen.”

AMD, which until last year had threatened to steal 30% marketshare from Intel, has been hurting badly after Intel leapfrogged AMD's previous technological superiority with a string of new releases in the past 12 months. Intel's smaller Silicon Valley neighbour is banking on its new quad-core architecture to regain lost marketshare over the last year.