AMD's Quad Core "Barcelona" in August

AMD's Quad core "Barcelona" chips are set to ship in August according to an AMD press release released on June 29^th. According to AMD "it is the world's first x86 CPU to integrate four processing cores on a single die of silicon". The new "Barcelona" chips are also backwards compatible with existing AMD "Opteron" platforms. Initial frequencies are expected to be up to 2.0ghz with faster speeds due for Q4/07.

The new chips operate within the same thermal envelope of the current generation "Opteron" chips. AMD states that the new quad core chips can offer up to 70% increase in performance on certain database applications and up to 40% increase in performance on certain floating point applications.

The new AMD quad core design is a significant departure from Intel's design. Intel has chosen to "Stack" dies on top of each other to achieve the same level of cores. Whereas AMD has chosen to create their new quad core chips on a single die, AMD calls their model "native quad-core". AMD's Quad Core design has significant advantages over Intel including reduced complexity in heat dispersal of the chip set, easier installation, reduced chance of chip damage on installation and a significantly faster design due to all cores being on one wafer of silicon. The speed, power and reduced advantages of AMD have become a major selling point over the last year as servers get continually consolidated in datacenters to reduce infrastructure costs. The new generation of quad core chipsets has doubled the processors-per-U in the last 6 months alone.

Intel already has plans to fight back with their new "Harpertown" chips due out later this year. "Harpertown" will be built on a 45nm process which offers a faster and less power hungry chip. AMD however is still using the 65nm process. If you dive into the design specs between AMD and Intel, you find that AMD chips typically execute more operations per clock cycle allowing AMD to lag behind on frequency and die shrinking while achieving the same performance as Intel's more expensive to produce chips. This alone allows AMD to offer a cheaper chip to the end consumer while maintaining an acceptable profit margin.Home PC enthusiasts should prepare their wallet for the new quad-core desktop as AMD will follow up the "Barcelona" server offering with a desktop quad-core design later this year. This will place server level performance in the reach for those of you that have to have the top of the line sitting on the desktop