When it comes to quad-core chips, good things come to those who wait, AMD believes. After years of being outplayed by AMD, Intel beat its rival to the punch by releasing its quad-core Xeon 5300 "Clovertown" processor for servers in November. But AMD"s "Barcelona" quad-core chip, due to arrive midway through 2007, will be a significant notch faster than the Clovertown chips expected to be on the market at that time, said Randy Allen, AMD"s corporate vice president for server and workstation products.
The quad-core processor era was ushered in with the release of quad-core processors for enthusiasts and for servers and workstations in November 2006 "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent," Allen said. The quad-core chip will also outperform AMD"s current dual-core Opterons on "floating point" mathematical calculations by a factor of 3.6 at the same clock rate, he said.