The first Barcelona models, formally called Quad-Core Opteron, will run at clock frequencies up to 2GHz and will be available in standard and low-power versions. Faster models, both of the standard and more power-hungry special-edition ilk, will arrive in the fourth quarter, the company said. The first servers using the chips will come in September…
AMD’s Barcelona puts four cores on a single slice of silicon, an approach AMD calls “native quad-core,” and the company has argued that Barcelona will outperform the Xeon 5300. The only problem: that comparison soon will become obsolete.
Intel’s second-generation quad-core server processors, “Harpertown” a server member of Intel’s “Penryn” family, will arrive this year, too, with the promise of better performance, lower power consumption and lower manufacturing costs by virtue of a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer features. AMD is only just now moving to a 65-nanometer process.
For decades, typical computer processors had a single processing engine, but dual-core models with two engines began arriving this decade as a way to try to improve performance without consuming inordinate amounts of power and producing corresponding amounts of waste heat. Now chipmakers have moved to quad-core and octo-core models; Sun Microsystems plans to debut its 16-core “Rock” chip in 2008.
Putting multiple cores on a chip isn’t a miracle cure, though. For one thing, it’s hard to adapt software for the chips–especially software for PCs.
For another, a chip with four cores consumes more power than an otherwise comparable model with two, so multicore chips typically run at lower clock frequencies to keep power consumption down. Current dual-core Opteron chips run as fast as 2.8GHz.
A faster clock frequency will let a processor execute a given task more quickly, but multiple cores will let it do more jobs at once.
Also this year, AMD plans to release a quad-core chip for PCs. It and high-end dual-core models will sport a new “Phenom” brand.
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