Weekly blog #1

With the code name Barcelona, Advance Micro Devices will launch its new quad-code processor on September 10th to compete with Intel's quad-core processors, including its server version Xeon. AMD will sell its server version under the name Opteron.
The clock speed, 2.3GHz by December, will be slower that Intel's which already reach 3GHz.
This will most probably start another price competition.

As per AMD, with its new 10h architecture, Barcelona will deliver a better price-to-performance ratio than Intel. the new features include:

"A move to 128-bit floating-point execution units in 10h from 64-bit FPUs. The wider design is expected to double the performance of floating-point vector operations;
A wider fetch window -- 32 bytes from 16 bytes. This is expected to allow the processor to handle a complete sequence of three large instructions per cycle;
Instruction-set improvements that include the addition of two advance bit-manipulation instructions, which operate on general-purpose registers;
And virtual machine optimizations in 10h to boost the performance of AMD's virtualization technology, as well as compiler-related optimizations."

when processor improvements approached the physical barriers to improve clock speed and reduce size, new strategies had to be implemented. Intel and AMD started to increase the number of core processor inside each unit instead or increasing the clock speed how they have been doing over the last 20 years. They maintained the clock speed and they improved the bits per cycle, the cache memory and the number of cores. Eventually, this will not be enough and another improvements or a new technology will have to be developed.

For a view of the complete story click on the link:

Quad-Core Barcelona Is Only A Start For AMD