AMD: Barcelona CPUs will hit 2 GHz at rollout

Advanced Micro Devices tipped more details about its upcoming Barcelona CPU, the industry's first native quad-core X86 processor. An analyst said the news was positive for AMD, especially given recent concerns about whether the CPU had missed its scheduled ship date.

Barcelona will ship to OEMs in August and be available in board and system products in September. The chip is said to increase performance by up to 70 percent on some database applications and 40 percent on floating-point operations compared with dual-core CPUs.

Barcelona will initially be offered at frequencies up to 2 GHz in both standard and low-power versions. Higher-frequency versions will ap- pear before the end of the year.

"Up to now, they have been pretty coy about when they are shipping, the performance of the chip and its frequency at launch. This will put to rest rumors that they were having trouble making the chip," said Na- than Brookwood, principal of market watcher Insight64 (Saratoga, Calif.). "The only other things I would like to see are some real benchmark numbers instead of percentages. Intel provided detailed performance numbers for its multichip package quad-core CPUs long before they shipped."

Intel's current multichip quad-core CPUs run at up to 2.67 GHz, which gives Intel the advantage in terms of frequency. "There's a question that needs to be answered about how much frequency will offset the architectural advantages" of AMD's slower Barcelona, which has four dice on the same silicon substrate, Brookwood said. He believes AMD will be able to raise the chip's frequency by 10 percent a quarter, to about 3 GHz by fall 2008.

Brookwood expects AMD will price Barcelona at the top end of the company's existing price range.

The 65-nanometer Barcelona will have to compete with Intel's upcoming 45-nm Penryn, which will also ship this year. Beyond that, Intel plans a microarchitecture called Nehalem that will use 45-nm technology and replace Intel's aging front-side bus with a faster, more versatile Common Systems Interface.

"Nehalem looks like it could be a barn burner," Brookwood said.