The gang at The Inquirer has aquired some new information regarding AMD's upcoming native, Quad-Core processor, dubbed Barcelona. They've got a number of synthetic benchmark results that paint a very good picture of Barcelona's performance, should they turn out to be correct...
"These performance numbers were based on systems using the Opteron 2356, or known to the world of us regular folks as AMD Quad Core at 2.3GHz. The price of this processor is currently set at $796 USD in quantities of 1000, so we'll see what can Clovertown at 2.66 GHz (Xeon 5355) do about it…
So, what will Barcelona deliver?
For starters, SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 speak the voice of doom for the 366 MHz faster clocked Xeon - and these are the reasons why Intel was downplaying performance of FP and praising the INT. These figures were from a few months ago, so things may well have changed since then. But in the Integer test, a Barcelona 2.3GHz yields 21% higher score than Clovertown 2.66 GHz, but Floating Point test leaves a staggering 50% performance deficit for Clovertown, and this is not something 45 nanometer Penryn can solve overnight. Unless, of course the clock deficit for AMD is such that Intel speeds past."
We'll know exactly how Barcelon performs once we get the processor in our lab and can run our own suite of benchmarks. But for now this is interesting news.
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
