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AMD Barcelona Launch Coverage
With the scores we saw we feel that the Barcelona certainly has great potential and offers a great amout of power at a much lower clock speed. It is unfortunate that most will assume clock speed equals performance which in this case the overall performance advantage of the Barcelona over the Xeon is about 20% per clock. Add to that the fact that the new Barcelona runs at a 1.22Vcore and has much lower operating temperatures than the standard Xeon and you have lower power consumption as well. The Asus KFSN4-DRE/SAS motherboard offers excellent features in a barcelona specialized motherboard where other manufacturers will be offering bios upgrades to boards that were not meant for Barcelona. AMD definitely selected the right manufacturer to assist them with this product launch as Asus has both the distribution and quality established to make sure they can meet demand and keep RMA's hopefully low.
We would like to see AMD ramp up the clock speed on the Barcelona's so that in the future we can compare the E5345 to an Barcelona Opteron running at about the same clock speed. If you must have the utmost in HPC power and have the need for such unrivaled power than currently there is no equal to the Barcelona in a clock vs clock battle.
