AMD demonstrated its promised "Barcelona" chip
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) showed a laboratory version of its promised "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron 8000 server chip to analysts gathered in Berkeley, Calif. on Thursday, 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. Customers could see performance improvements of up to 70% in database applications and 40% in floating-point applications, when compared to AMD's dual-core "Rev F" Opteron, the company said.
The demonstration was AMD's second effort Thursday to show that it is keeping up with quad-core chips from rival Intel Corp. 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.
Intel lost significant market share to AMD in 2006 as it was criticized for being slow to produce chips that emphasized power efficiency instead of pure calculating speed. Intel has bounced back in recent months with the launch of dual-core chips including the Core 2 Duo for desktops and Xeon 5100 "Woodcrest" for servers.