Barcelona by AMD is On Track

The world leading chipmaker, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), announced its new quad core processor, “Barcelona” will make its global debut in the in August. The Barcelona processor by AMD was formerly called Quad-Core Opteron. It runs at clock frequencies up to 2GHz and available in standard and low power versions. This processor will improve the PC’s overall memory performance with native quad-core processing.

Barcelona basically has four cores on a single chip, a design that is claimed to improve processor power management. According to AMD, this works on the theory that cores which are directly linked will offer better performance than those that have to exchange information along pathways outside core. The processor also uses a dedicated L3 cache and new 128-bit floating point math units in each of its cores. This will reduce memory latency.

When AMD released its 64-bit Opteron processor family, it has successfully gained substantial market share against Intel’s Xeon due to its better performance. Intel was then fought back in 2006 by introducing its dual-core Xeon 5100 “Woodcrest” model. By end of 2006, Intel has again introduced its upgraded version Xeon 5300 “Clovertown” quad-core model. With the introduction of Barcelona, AMD is of the opinion that Barcelona will definitely outperform the Xeon 5300 series.