AMD Shows Quad Core Performance

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Barcelona represents AMD's current hope for returning to profitability by stabilizing its server processor prices. The company has been forced to dramatically cut the prices of its dual-core Opteron processors to compete with Intel's quad-core server processors, which have been on the market since last November. The hope is that Barcelona's design, in which four processing cores rest on the same piece of silicon, delivers enough of a performance boost over Intel's quad-core Xeon chip to once again attract demanding server buyers. Intel chose to put two dual-core chips into a single package for its first quad-core processors in order to get out in the market well ahead of AMD; AMD contends that's an inelegant design that doesn't solve Intel's problems with memory bandwidth.