Barcelona "faster than Intel's Clovertown"

 

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By Ross Burridge in Barcelona

Posted on 11 Sep 2007 at 10:44

AMD may have been reticent about discussing Barcelona's performance until now, but that all changed today.

At the launch event in Barcelona this morning, the company's technical marketing director, Guiseppe Amato, claimed the 2GHz part will "outperform a 2.6GHz Clovertown" Intel processor and, "in certain circumstances, a 3GHz".

AMD's bullish claims are a far cry from the early reports from a leading motherboard manufacturer, who told PC Pro that the performance gain "wasn't that obvious" based on its tests of early samples.

Partners such as Dell, HP and VMWare have also been on-hand to wave the flag for Barcelona's capabilities, with its memory and floating point performance being singled out for particular praise. But it's virtualisation that's been singled out as crucial to Barcelona's future, being used as an underpinning theme here at the launch.

Partners have been lining up to stress the manageability, energy saving and flexibility benefits of virtualisation for data centres, with Fujitsu Siemens' CTO Joseph Reger claiming "there is no better means today to reduce power consumption."

Iain Stephen, VP of industry standard servers in Europe for HP, claims "these boxes are going to absolutely fly when running virtualisation", whilst VMWare's Steve Jackson declared it as Quad Core Opteron's "killer app".

Click here for our technical lowdown on the new processor

See the Barcelona launch timeline here