Category: Quad-Core

AMD’s upcoming Barcelona processors will feature an enhanced PowerNow feature. Each of the four cores on this chip will be capable of running at completely different clock speeds depending on load. AMD claims this will cut another 10Watts per chip, even though they are adding an additional 2 cores.

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.

DailyTech has a post up that talks about the Quad-Core Opterons, they have a spec sheet and all. The earliest of them are going to start production in June of this year, they will begin selling them in the middle of this year aswell. The desktop consumer level on socket AM2 will be under production in Q4 of this year and the launch is to be determined.

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