There are lots of question marks surrounding AMD’s first quad-core CPU, the Barcelona server/workstation processor. How fast will it be and - most importantly - will it be able to outpace Intel’s quad-core Xeon 5300-series (“Clovertown”) processors. It will, says AMD, and in fact upgraded its performance expectations.
So far, we the company had claimed that Barcelona will surpass the performance of Clovertown by about 40% at any given clock speed. Now the company says that it believes that Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance “over the competition’s highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency.”
AMD: Barcelona quad-core 50% faster than Intel’s quad-core Xeon