AMD Barcelon Native Quad-Core Coming in June?
According to sources at HKEPC, AMD is planning to launch multiple flavors of their upcoming native quad-core processors, codenamed "Barcelona" in June. And if the information they've compiled is correct, the fastest processor in the group will be clocked at 2.3GHz.
"The next-generation AMD quad-core Opteron, codenamed Barcelona and fabricated by 65nm manufacturing technology, is natively designed with 4 functioning cores, each of them owns 512KB L2 Cache and share the same 2MB L3 Cache. Barcelona supports for 128Bit FPU and provides a capability of up to 4 FLOPS/clock. The interface remains in Socket F (1207), and therefore it's compatible to the existing Socket F platforms."
Barcelona is based on a new microarchitecture with IPC enhancements and a new cache cache structure that includes 2MB of shared L3. It's going to be interesting to see how the processors perform at 2.3GHz, when reps from AMD have publicly stated that Barcelona will be up to 40% faster than the competition with some workloads.
