14 DAY TRIAL // The launch of a new computer hardware part is always a pretty tense moment as the manufacturing company can not really know how its product will be received by the market and the tension is going even higher when a lot of things are depending on a single line of products. This is exactly the case with the next generation of AMD processors, the Barcelonas, which are the first monolithic "true" native quad core processors in the world.
The computer hardware market has known essentially two typed of product launches: one and the best case when the product is available immediately and the second case when the manufacturing company simply announces that a certain product will become available soon. The best case is of course the first especially when we are talking about such a competitive market as the processors' market. In order to make the Barcelona central processing units available from the day of the launch, the manufacturing company Advanced Micro Devices started shipping increasing numbers of processors from August, a company spokesperson confirmed. "AMD can confirm that Barcelona has been shipping for revenue in August," said Phil Hughes, an AMD's spokesperson for server and workstation products, who was cited by the news site xbitlabs[http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20070831115038.html].
While the AMD spokesperson declined to comment of the processors' clock speeds or other technical specifications as well as talking very little about production volumes and registered demands, it is almost certain that these revenue shipments will help AMD improve its financial results as novelties, especially in the computer world, are usually sold at much higher margins than existing products. The Barcelona class of central processing units will arrive under the commercial name of Opteron and those CPUs will be intended for use in servers. Made using a 65 nanometer fabrication process, the new generation of Opterons will feature, according to an earlier report, 2MB L3 cache memory, 128-bit floating point units, FPU for short, SSE4A instructions, support for dual-channel DDR2 memory and other innovations which are intended to increase performance and cut energy consumption while maintaining the processor running at a reasonable temperature even under high workloads.
The AMD next generation of Opterons come featuring a monolithic design which means that there are four processing cores on a single silicon die, unlike the Intel quad core design which uses two dual core chips on a single silicon substrate, an approach which is simpler to implement but which offers slightly lower performance. The Barcelonas will officially be available starting on the 10th of September and AMD plans for both low and high end models as well as versions intended for low power consumption.