AMD Debuts Quad-Core Offering

For better performance, AMD designed Barcelona to be its first native quad-core processor, where all four cores reside on one piece of silicon, according to vendor officials.

The native design of the processor allows the cores to interact more efficiently within the processor, resulting in power cost savings, says John Fruehe, worldwide business development manager for AMD.

The new CPU line, built using the 65-nanometer manufacturing process, features improved energy efficiency, better performance, virtualization and investment protection, says Fruehe.

The latest version of the Opteron processor, which has been in development for the past year-and-a-half, will have the same thermal range as its dual-core predecessor, leading to better energy efficiency, says Fruehe.

Barcelona will also feature the "cool core," which will allow the processor to identify which cores are not being used and then shut them down, without any interference from the operating system or the user. The cores turn on automatically when needed.

The new architecture also allows Barcelona to manage each of its cores individually and assign a different clock speed to each core based on its level of utilization, explains Fruehe. "This allows for deeper savings," he adds.

However, Barcelona's clock speed will be lower than the current speed for the dual-core Opteron, which ranges from 1.8 GHz to 2.6 GHz, Fruehe says.

Barcelona will include AMD Virtualization technology, which features rapid virtualization indexing that enables customers using server-virtualization platform VMware to further increase CPU utilization and provide more efficient memory access, says Fruehe.

AMD shipped the first Barcelona processors in July and is currently delivering the quad-core CPU to some of its system partners. AMD's existing client base can upgrade to Barcelona in eight to 10 minutes by changing the processor and downloading new software that will update the system to recognize the new processor, explains Fruehe.

The front office will adapt the quad-core for workstation-type applications quickly, to be used for things such as modeling, database searching and management, and financial applications and trading, vendor officials say.

Most front-office work is divided into two major categories—task workers, who work on applications like Microsoft Word and Excel; and knowledge workers, who tend to have more specialized applications that run on workstations, Fruehe explains.

"Barcelona is well positioned for the knowledge workers who have application-specific needs, using specialized workstations," he adds.

AMD rival Intel, which released its quad-core Xeon processor in late 2006, did not respond to requests for comment by press time. AMD plans to launch a 45-nanometer quad-core processor called Shanghai in 2008, officials say.