AMD has started make more and more actual information available to the public, not just theoretic PR talk, as Barcelona has been on display at Computex. During a press event earlier this week AMD presented its new quad-core architecture and compared it to its current dual-core architecture and the focus was on the power consumption of the two processors. With two dual socket systems equipped with each processor it was clear that AMD’s quad-core architecture was not only able to keep the power consumption at the same level as the older K8 architecture, but actually outperform it. The system with dual quad-core Barcelona processors consumed 214W while the system with dual dual-core K8 processors consumed 259W.
The power consumption was measured at full load and should in practice mean that you get twice the performance in multithreaded applications while consuming less power.
This is certainly something sever manufacturers will revere and doesn’t exactly reduce the interest in AMD’s delayed Barcelona architecture.
