AMD Finally Unveils Barcelona Chip

Justin Oblehelm writes "AMD has finally unveiled its first set of quad-core processors, three months after its original launch date due to its "complicated" design. Barcelona comes in three categories: high-performance, standard-performance and energy-efficient server models, but only the standard (up to 2.0 GHz) and energy-efficient (up to 1.9 GHz) categories will be available at launch. The high-performance Opterons, together with higher frequencies of the standard and energy-efficient chips, are expected in the out in the fourth quarter of this year. But it's far from clear that this is the product that will help right AMD's ship."

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Benchmarks

[eebra82]

Here's some benchmarking done by Anandtech.

And a performance preview for Barcelona desktop as well.

Techreport

[Eukariote]

The Techreport also has a review up: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176/1. Barcelona is similar to Core2, clock for clock. It has better energy efficiency and SMP scaling. But the clock frequencies will need to come up in order to beat Intel's highest clocking chips in absolute performance.