AMD Barcelona and the 40% number.

January 29, 2007 John Obeto

At a briefing at the Windows Vista™ RTM Labs in January, Pat Moorhead of AMD told us to expect great things from AMD, especially in the Quad-core space.

When pressed, he just had a sly smile and asked us to wait.

“Why”, we asked?

Great things are in the pipeline.

“Your 2-socket, quad-core offering is inelegant”, we said.

He reminded us of the fact that our buy-in into the 2-socket solution also ensures that our investment would be easily upgradeable to the forthcoming (Q2 2007) AMD single-socket chip, for a total of eight, yes, eight cores on a single motherboard, blogged about here.

When I tried to press him about whatever they would announce at the ISSCC, and also tried to goad him by talking up (rival) Intel’s currently shipping quad-core CPU, codenamed Cloverton, he did not take the bait.

However, Pat intimated that we would be impressed by the processor, even more so than we were used to from AMD.

Hmmmmm…….

At the 2007 International CES, which ran subsequent to the Vista RTM Lab, I tried to get someone lower down the foodchain (a booth droid) to divulge info to no avail.

Now we know why!

On Friday, January 26, AMD picked up the gauntlet Intel had thrown down, and gave Intel a boot-lickin' smackdown with it.

AMD is estimating that the next generation mainstream AMD chip, codename Barcelona, will show a performance boost over Cloverton of 40% during a normal load.

Are you kidding me?

40%?

How could they do that?

Well, documents revealed to me disclose the following two diagrams, the first about the architectural design of Barcelona, and the second about its design goals.

AMD Barcelona Architectural Design

AMD Barcelona Design Goals

From the graphic, you can see that the performance delta can run as high as 80% on certain applicarions, per core.

That, folks, is real smokin' performance!

If the rumors are true that Intel's Penryn part is just a 45nm MCM, and not a true native quad-core part, then AMD's Barcelona more and more becomes the yardstick for quad-core CPUs, just as Opteron was.

At SmallBizVista.com, we are looking forward to laying our grubby hands on this beauty very soon.

My report on AMD for the forthcoming replacement season will be released in the next two weeks.