AMD has just as Intel very exciting plans for processors with four cores and even if we haven’t seen any of them yet and will not see any commercial Athlon and Opteron processors with four cores this year AMD has great faith in its architecture. At HardOCP they’ve now published an article where they’ve taken a closer look at AMD’s plans for its quad-core processor architecture known as Barcelona, but is better known by most as K8L. HardOCP has had a chat with AMD’s Phil Hester, Senior VP and CTO of AMD, we get a lot more information about AMD’s coming quad-core processors which has been developed from the base and up as a quad-core processor.
That Barcelona is a native quad-core architecture is something AMD refers to at several occasions and this simply means that it has used a new architecture where it has integrated four cores into the same package, unlike Intel’s quad-core where it has in theory taken two Core 2 Duo dies and used them on the same processor with its Kentsfield architecture (Core 2 Quadro). Overall the Barcelona architecture’s specifications well match those we found out earlier.
However, this time they share a lot more details and amongst others they try to give a concrete answer to how AMD’s Barcelona architecture will stand up to Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quadro in performance per core. In short, Barcelona will eat up the advantage Intel has created with the Core architecture. AMD’s can hardly be considered as clear as day but at least it shows great faith in the Barcelona architecture.
“With our next-generation architecture we expect to continue our track record of delivering industry-leading performance. When you combine this with 4X4 you change the rules of the game, and provide an enthusiast-class platform that is upgradeable, scaleable and unparalleled in terms of performance.”
They also discuss how future applications will be able to handle four individual cores in one processor and it seems the video game consoles could be the key to this as both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 relies on games using multi-threaded technology.
They also discuss important things such as backwards comaptibility, which seem very good, and also AMD’s acquisition of ATI. A very interesting article which supplies a lot of information about AMD’s coming four-core processors. It’s pretty clear AMD is out to get past Intel and its Core 2 Duo.
