AMD‘s first quad-core processor architecture, also known as Barcelona and K8l, has started to become more and more official after Intel’s launch of Kentsfield. Now motherboard manufacturer says that AMD has announced that it has sped up the launch of the Barcelona architecture, from 2008 to the third quarter of 2007. AMD’s first desktop processor with the new architecture will be known as Altair and be made with a 65nm manufacturing process. As earlier information has revealed each core will get a L2 cache at 512KB while they share a 2MB L3 cache. The frequencies will land at 2.7-2.9GHz and the processors will most likely be a part of Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X4 series.
Even if Altair will use HyperTransport 3.0 the processors will be compatible with K8 motherboards using HyperTransport 1.0. AMD self has chosen not to comment on this information but after that we’ve seen preproduction silicon wafers with AMD’s Barcelona circuits we can’t help but feeling AMD is close to it. Hopefully AMD can keeps its tighter launch plan so that we get to see quad-core processors from both AMD and Intel this year.
