Contrary to all the noise being generated by Intel about that die-shrink MCM known as 'Penryn', I am convinced that waiting for Barcelona is still the best bet for enterprises wanting to upgrade their server hardware this year.

Since Barcelona follows the usual AMD dev strategy, it will have the usual lead in scalability, and flexibility, power and thermal displacement that we have come to expect from Opteron. Furthermore, it will have cooling intelligence built into the CPU.

The only reason Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Extreme is being mentioned now is because Santa Clara was able to bring its economics of scale to bear on manufacturing to produce the MCM that is Core Extreme/Penryn.

As for all that talk about Nehalem.

What Nehalem?

In 2008?

I have no doubt that when Barcelona drops, all talk of Nehalem would evaporate, as its performance would send poor Nehalem back to the drawing board, a la Pentium 5 and Itanic.

While I shall be poring through recently-acquired information, press releases, published information, and rumors/facts in the blogosphere over the next few days, be rest assured I will have more on this next week.

© 2007, John Obeto II for SmallBizVista.com^®