Intel has really been riding the wave of success and with the help of its Core architecture it has constantly been gaining more and more trust among consumers and companies. The last we heard, Sun Microsystems announced that it will broaden its x86/x64 assortment with Woodcrest-based servers after relying solely on AMD’s Opteron platform for a long time. We we will have to wait and see how long Intel will remain on the performance throne, but if we’re to believe AMD it will only be up to the launch of the Barcelona core. AMD’s first quad-core architecture doesn’t just sport more cores, but also optimizations that will improve the overall performance.
According to a notice at ZDNet AMD has, through Randy Allen, VP of server and workstation market, seriously started bragging about the performance of Barcelona.
“We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent,” Allen said. The quad-core chip also will outperform AMD’s current dual-core Opterons on “floating point” mathematical calculations by a factor of 3.6 at the same clock rate, he said.
AMD is of course partial, but when Intel launched its Xeon 5100 series it claimed, just like AMD, that its new architecture offered 40 percent better performance than AMD’s equivalent. We will just have to wait and see if AMD can keep its word about Barcelona, but we sincerely hope that AMD launches a new architecture that can really compete with the Core architecture, which currently is in total control of the retail market.
