Could AMD's answer to Core be right around the corner? According to them, their planned Quad-core Barcelona, scheduled to be here in a few months, will not only be faster than existing Core based CPUs, but also come out ahead of Intel's Xeon 5300 series. And not just by a small margin, either, but considerable amounts:
"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.
They can only talk, right now, because the chip is as of yet unreleased, but on paper it's always appeared to be a strong chip. With built in L3 cache, a core architecture revision, 65nm process and a host of others, it promises a lot. Will it deliver? The waiting is almost over, and AMD will be put to the test. Can they get back on top, or will Intel put them to shame?