The AMD Phenom X4 9500 which has a 95-watt thermal envelope and a 2.2GHz operating frequency should be priced at $280 (retail). The Phenom X4 9600 which runs at 2.3GHz with 512KB of L2 cache per core will be priced at $320 (retail). The final offering is the AMD Phenom X4 9700 will be priced at $330 and has an operating frequency of 2.4GHz and has a 125-watt thermal envelope.

The 9700 was originally going to be clocked at 2.6GHz and before you get worried about how stable the chip is, DailyTech suggests that the sudden decrease may have something to do with “creative marketing plans.”

AMD has also shown off 3.0GHz Phenom processors in the past but according to the roadmap we won’t be seeing Phenom processors with that kind of operating frequency until 2008.

UPDATE: DigiTimes suggests that the reason for the lack of 2.6GHz at launch may be to do with problems transitioning from 90nm to 65nm and that we may only see two Phenom CPUs at launch, those being the 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz models.

DigiTimes also goes on to say that the 2.4GHz 9700 model won’t be coming out until December.

Check out some of the early news at the following:
PC Perspective – AMD Barcelona Opteron Processor Launch Is Upon Us
PC Perspective – AMD Introduces the World’s Most Advanced x86 Processor
AnandTech: AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks
AnandTech: AMD’s Quad-Core Barcelona: Defending New Territory

The processor is clocked at 2.0GHz and is showing about a 20% improvement over K8. This is just a taste of what we should expect later on this year on the desktop with AMD Phenom. Phenom will be even faster then these chips, it will be clocked at around 2.5GHz. I’m personally excited, and really hoping that this will compete with Intel a little bit better then the older Opteron and Athlon processors.

Update: Here is some more links to Barcelona news:
Extremetech – AMD’s ‘Barcelona” Chips Claim Performance Advantages
Arstechnica – Barcelona’s out, and the “reviews” are… out
Cnet – AMD’s Barcelona not a savior, yet

When they ran 3DMark06 on the system without an overclock they were able to score 23,768. After the overclocked it came to 30,031.

Barcelona is coming out to be quite the performer and I can’t wait for the chip to come out. I’m, of course, more excited about Phenom a month or two afterwards but Barcelona is going to tell us what to expect from Phenom.

Another thing found out by theInquirer is that AMD Barcelona has a few GB/s of memory bandwidth more then any Intel offering which is GREAT. Especially since Barcelona is on DDR2-800 and is still faster then any DDR3 offering. AMD seems to be smart in this transition from DDR2 to DDR3 like they were with the transition from DDR to DDR2. DDR3 doesn’t yet have any advantage over DDR2 except for the marketing benefits of having a larger number in its name.

theInquirer

The first processors based on Barcelona will be available at 2.0GHz but faster chips will be available soon afterwards. The desktop version of Barcelona which is named Phenom will be available in the 4th quarter of this year.

This is great news for AMD because they have been behind Intel for quite sometime now. I think it was extremely important for AMD to launch these quad-cores before the end of this year and certainly the Phenom chips by Christmas time. With it being available before Christmas, shoppers will undoubtedly be told by computer ads featuring AMD processors that AMD is the only one with “true quad-core processors,” a great way to market of course.

I really hope that these chips perform, if they don’t AMD is in real trouble.

Read More about it at ExtremeTech

Phenom X4 GP-7100 – 2.2 to 2.4GHz – 3600MHz HyperTransport 3.0 – 89 Watts
Phenom GP-7000 – 2.0 to 2.2GHz – 3200MHz HyperTransport 3.0 – 89 Watts

Phenom X2 GP-6650 – 202 to 2.6GHz – 3600 HyperTransport 3.0 – 65 Watts
Phenom X2 GP-6800 – 2.4 to 2.8GHz – 4000MHz HyperTransport 3.0 – 89 Watts

The processors sound pretty good but I have an interesting theory of how AMD could turn things around. Intel was capable of putting out a Quad-Core processor very quickly because they slapped two Dual-core processors on a single chip. AMD could do it similarly with Quad-Core processors allowing them to have an 8-core processor in a single socket or a 16-core processor in a dual-socket motherboard. This of course would only swing things AMD’s way and Intel could easily do the same with 8-core processors but none the less AMD could use this to their advantage and be to market with a 16-core computer faster then Intel.

Source for AMD processors details – DailyTech

This clock speed was accomplished using liquid nitrogen cooling and bumping the voltage to 1.65v.

VR-Zone

They are saying that the first of the Barcelona chips will show up on September 10th, 2 of them to be exact. A 1.9GHz numbered by AMD the 2348 and a 2GHz 2350. 2.1GHz 2352 and a 2.2GHz 2354 will be released in October.

the Inquirer has a lot more information about AMD Barcelona Clockspeeds.

You can read DigiTimes article here.

You have to wonder what has caused this change to AMD just a year or so ago they were on top of the world beating Intel in almost every benchmark including power consumption. It could have been the acquisition of ATI or could have been a poorly timed acquisition of ATI, when Intel began to kick back into gear and bring out the Core Duo chips. AMD just couldn’t compete, they lost the mobile market first and now are losing the desktop and server market. Barcelona isn’t exactly their last chance but it definitely will cause a lot of people to think so.

But now its not only AMD having problems it is also ATI which finally shipped their first DX10 parts less than a week ago. AMD of course has control over ATI but ATI was already starting to slip and now two companies are having problems with power consumption and performance. If they don’t start buckling down, and I hate to have to keep saying this, many bad things will be in the future for them.

The barcelona server chips will hit July or August with the desktop part later this year.

AMD showed off these chips by encoding a 1080p movie in h.264 at near real-time.

The machines were also running with Radeon HD 2900XT cards which will be launching May 14th.

[H] Enthusiast
DailyTech

No doubt an extremely fast processor, Penryn will be much faster, but this is fast.

Every time I hear about new Intel advancements I have to wonder what the heck AMD is doing with Barcelona. If Barcelona doesn’t deliver it will be very tough for AMD to catch up, right now Intel seems so far ahead it is a wonder if AMD will ever be able to catch up. I think they can but it will be quite some time before you see AMD’s highest end beating Intels highest end.

DigiTimes
DailyTech

ExtremeTech did a great review of the processor and you check that out here.

This is pretty amazing and will no doubt put AMD back in the game when it comes to raw speed and power efficiency against Intel.

Check out the whole article here at DailyTech.

“We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent,” AMD’s corporate vice president for server and workstation products, Randy Allen.

The quad-core processor will be built with 65nm manufacturing process. The new chip is said to be built with the same thermal and electrical envelope as existing dual core opterons. The quad core chips with feature some L3 cache which most of the AMD chips do not have. The total will be 2MB for the L3 cache. The chip will also feature AMD virtualization technology.

The chip will fit into socket F systems and will only require a bios update.

If what AMD says is true then Intel will mean some trouble for Intel. I’m really excited about this, the new chips should debut in the middle of this year. What’s great about this is that the consumers will get better prices after some price drops because Intel and AMD are only really competing on the amount of computing power you get per $1