Barcelona will be one of AMD’s most important processor architectures ever as it after many years of gaining on Intel has had a tough time after the launch Core architecture by Intel. Barcelona will take the K8 architecture to new heights and it most likely will have to to keep AMD in the race. Even if the quad-core Barcelona architecture isn’t a completely new architecture there are a lot of things that have been changed since the older K8 model and at Anandtech they’ve now published an article which goes into detail and discuss the architecture’s design and the differences between it and K8.
Interesting reading which doesn’t really answer our question about the performance of Barcelona, but perhaps makes us feel a little better and explains what we should be able to expect from AMD’s next processor architecture.
AMD had worked on dramatic successors to the K8, rumored to be K9 and K10, but both appeared to be scrapped or at least focus was shifted away from them in favor of a more evolutionary take on the K8 architecture. The main difference here that allowed Intel to catch up to AMD’s performance is that while Intel’s Pentium 4 team was operating on the usual schedule of a 5-year micro-architecture cycle, the Pentium M team at IDC was updating its architecture every year. Banias, Dothan, Yonah and Merom/Conroe all happened in a period of four years, and during that same time AMD’s K8 remained unchanged.
