AMD has now announced that its new Opteron series based on the Barcelona architecture will be shipping as planned in August, both standard and low power versions. Barcelona is the first native quad-core to arrive, something AMD is very clear on in its press release. AMD expects system builders to have products based on the new Opterons available and ready for shipping in September. The new processors operate within the same thermal envelope as the last generation and will work at frequencies up to 2.0GHz. Later shipments will have higher frequencies, but right now 2.0GHz is the top model.
“AMD estimates that the new processors can provide a performance increase up to 70 percent on certain database applications and up to 40 percent on certain floating point applications, with subsequent higher frequency processors expected to significantly add to this performance advantage.”
AMD touts the energy efficiency and performance per watt ratio of the new processors, and while it only specifies the fourth quarter as to when the next shipment will arrive, we can be certain that there will be models with higher frequencies. Up to at least 2.5 GHz this year according to roadmaps we’ve seen.
There is a nice parallel to the initial Opteron launch where the first model launched at 1.6 GHz and was actually not very impressive in many ways, but later models changed that and Opteron grew to become a strong and very well established product.
