Barcelona arrives at last

 

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By Barry Collins and Reuters

Posted on 10 Sep 2007 at 09:57

AMD will today finally unveil its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processors as the company attempts to regain lost ground on Intel.

PC Pro will be bringing you reports live from the launch event in Barcelona later today, as AMD unveils the industry's first native quad-core processor.

Click here to read our Barcelona launch timeline.

Click here to read our technical lowdown on Barcelona

AMD has made much of the fact that Barcelona will be the first processor with all four cores on the same silicon die. Whether that will result in a significant speed boost is questionable, with major motherboard manufacturers casting doubt over Barcelona's performance gains.

We've also yet to be granted access to samples of the Barcelona processors, while AMD itself has been remarkably reticent in providing benchmark scores for the new chips.

However, AMD can count on the support of the world's leading server manufacturers for today's launch. Dell, HP, Sun and IBM all plan to include Barcelona in their server products.

Intel counter

Intel has reacted aggressively to the arrival of Barcelona with the launch of its Tigerton quad-core server processors. The company has long had quad-core processors in the market, of course, preferring to opt for two dual-core processors on the same die rather than waiting for its own native quad-core chips, codenamed Penryn, to arrive.

The Barcelona chips were originally scheduled to launch in the first half of this year, and the delay has given Intel the upper-hand in processor performance. Analysts say AMD has ground to make up. "The stakes here are for AMD to staunch the erosion in its marketshare and to once again go on the offensive against Intel," says Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood. "That's the biggest thing."