Advanced Micro Devices today showed a laboratory version of its promised "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron 8000 server chip to analysts gathered in Berkeley, California, and said it plans to begin selling the product in the second quarter of 2007.
AMD will pitch the chip to users of high-end, commercial workstations and servers.
Users could see performance improvements of up to 70 percent in database applications and 40 percent in floating-point applications compared with AMD's dual-core "Rev. F" Opteron.
The demonstration was AMD's second effort to show that it is keeping up with quad-core chips from rival Intel. AMD also launched its "4x4" Quad FX Platform, a motherboard with two dual-core Athlon 64 FX-70 series chips intended for the desktop gaming market.