Higher Frequency AMD Barcelona CPUs Slated for Q4

In response to a BetaNews inquiry over whether last Friday's announcement of new Barcelona server-class processors at frequencies up to 2.0 GHz for August release was as fast as we would see for 2007, an AMD spokesperson told us faster models would be made available later in the year.

"AMD expects that its native quad-core processors will scale to higher frequencies in Q407 in both standard and SE (Special Edition) versions," the spokesperson told BetaNews, reiterating from a statement made earlier. "Designed to operate within the same thermal envelopes as current generation AMD Opteron processors, AMD estimates that the new processors can provide a performance increase up to 70% on certain database applications and up to 40% on certain floating point applications, with subsequent higher frequency processors expected to significantly add to this performance advantage."

Note the performance increase comparison is over current generation dual-core Opterons. Notice also that AMD has not given a commercial nomenclature to the new CPUs yet, leading to speculation there may be a new brand for these quad-core chips.

It is the relative performance of these new CPUs against Intel's quad-core Xeons (Clovertown architecture) that will determine whether AMD can recapture the market share it precipitously lost to Intel in the last half of 2006. AMD has built up tremendous anticipation for Barcelona as a processor generation that will leap over Clovertown the way Clovertown leapt over the previous Opterons in 2P configurations.

As ZDNet blogger George Ou wrote in May, for Barcelona to achieve what AMD had claimed to be a 20% performance advantage over Intel's Clovertown - currently available at 3.0 GHz - it would need to be made available at 2.5 GHz or higher. Barcelona can achieve par against a Clovertown CPU that's 500 MHz faster by virtue of converging all four cores onto a single die, with a single on-board memory controller.

Intel's current architecture (which it plans to transition from next year) is more of a "double dual-core" system in which two dual-core dies share the same package, and are controlled by an external memory controller.

Speculation over the past few weeks was that AMD might postpone its Barcelona launch until past September, in order to meet its speed objectives. Rather than delay, AMD appears willing to release a lesser version of Barcelona earlier.

But we don't know how high AMD's scale will go; and for now, its promise of 40% better performance over its own existing models may not be enough to appease OEMs and server builders, who know a 5% edge here or there in the benchmarks isn't enough to persuade customers to change their preferences.

The AMD spokesperson also denied claims made by the Taiwanese industry daily DigiTimes that the company was delaying the rollout of its consumer-grade quad-core Phenom processors until early 2008. Phenom is still on track for the second half of 2007, BetaNews was told.