Barcelona is FINALLY launched!

A few select sites on the net were fortunate enough to receive Barcelona's to test before the launch, and after looking at those reviews, it has become apparent that while Barcelona is a nice upgrade from dual core Opteron's, it is not yet up to trying to take the performance crown back from Intel.

This is not necessarily a disaster; as long as AMD makes Barcelona be a good value on the price for performance curve, it will still find a large number of adopters in server space. But, if AMD wants to compete directly against the performance of Intel's offerings, they are going to have get those clock speeds as high as they can -- as soon as they can.

AMD prepared a 24 page presentation - here we will just go over the highlights:

• Barcelona is the most significant launch for AMD since the Opteron in 2003
• Energy efficiency and virtualization are key features for the data center

AMD is entirely right in that the new quad core processors are its most significant launch since 2003; and frankly, it badly needs them to succeed. They are even right that energy efficiency is very important, however AMD desperately needs to get its processors to run at close to 3GHz on the high end as soon as possible.

AMD has segmented its new quad core Opteron lineup into three market segments:

• "HE" - Energy Efficient - lowest TDP, launched at 1.9GHz
• Standard Performance - price/performance sweetspot, up to 2GHz at launch
• "SE" - High Performance - where performance is most important, 2.3GHz+ in Q4

All three categories are promised to scale to higher frequencies later.