AMD Barcelon Native Quad-Core Coming in June?

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, February 23, 2007, 10:30 AM EDT

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.

Tags: AMD, ATI, Core, quad-core, bar, arc, NAT, Ive, ativ, CEL, AR, AM, COM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com