AMD to shout olé with Barcelona quad-core

Stan Beer
Sunday, 09 September 2007 12:04

Your IT - Home IT

AMD has been saying for a year that Intel's Xeon quad-core processors are really two stitched together dual-cores and that AMD's "true" quad-core Barcelona chips with four processors on a single die will smoke the Intel products when they're released. On Monday, September 10, AMD will have a chance to put its money where its mouth is when Barcelona is released.

Two months ago, AMD promised that Barcelona, produced using 65-nanometer manufacturing process, would deliver significant performance enhancements over existing architectures - meaning the Intel Xeon quad-core implementation.

How much is significant? According to AMD, Barcelona can deliver a 70% performance increase on database applications and a 40% improvement on floating point applications with chips initially running at 2.0Ghz and ramping up to 3.0Ghz by mid-2008.

After trailing Intel to the market by a full year with a quad-core offering, AMD has stuck with the line that its new quad-core on a single die offering will be more efficient than Intel's architecture because the processing cores on Barcelona chips each have their own discrete cache and thus require less clock cycles when a memory request is made on a core.

For its part, Intel which has recaptured the initiative and market share from AMD in the past 12 months, has rubbished AMD's claims that there is an advantage of having four cores on a single die. Intel has stated with some justification through a number of senior executives, from CEO Paul Otellini down, that customers don't give a hoot what's "under the hood".

AMD is no doubt hoping that customers will care what's under the hood if Barcelona can demonstrate markedly superior performance come September 10.