AMD is still pretty quiet about the performance of its Barcelona architecture, but during Computex the first official benchmarks with the new architecture has been released through AMD’s server partners MSI, Supermicro, Tyan and Uniwide, which have displayed quad-core Barcelona systems. The processors that was on display at Computex were running at 1.6GHz. At DailyTech they also managed to run a round of Cinebench with one of AMD’s demo systems and the same test that took 27 seconds with a 1.6GHz Barcelona processor took 17 seconds with an Intel Xeon 3220 (2.4GHz) system. In other words, Barcelona got slapped silly by the Xeon, although it did operate at a much higher frequency.
Even when you recalculate the result with regard to the frequencies, the Intel system still wins, but then again, one should not read too much into this. Although, this is pretty much the only real benchmark we havewith Barcelona.
“AMD partner engineers tell DailyTech the chip we tested was the latest revision silicon. The same engineers claim 2.0 GHz Barcelona chips are making the rounds, with 2.3 GHz already on the desktop and server roadmaps.”
