Barcelona is processor manufacturer AMD’s coming quad-core architecture, also known as K8L (which is wrong though) and K10. AMD’s VD Hector Ruiz has in an interview with CRN revealed some more about Barcelona and AMD’s plans to introduce this on the market. It seems that AMD will phase in the new processors and at the end of the year the assortment will still consist out of a large amount of AM2 and Socket F processors and AM2 will still be around for 2008, together with AM2+ and Socket F+.
At the same time, reports about Barcelona only being HT3.0 for single processor systems have appeared and according to this report dual and octo Opterons will only be HT1.0 compatible. Why AMD has chosen this approach is hard to say, especially as HT3.0 has full backwards compatibility with HT1.0.
It seems that AMD will start shipping Opterons based on Barcelona already during the next quarter, but only at speeds between 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz. During the third quarter there will be models running at speeds up to 2.6GHz. Even if AMD has been boasting both performance and power consumption it’s hard not to be a skeptic when you see these figures and that includes a specified TDP at 95W. Theoretical numbers say very little about the practical performance though and we will not deliver a judgment before we the processors in hand.
