Chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices has announced that the first servers powered by the company's quad-core Barcelona chips are slated for April this year. Company executives claim that the advent of the new processor on the server market will cut down the distance between AMD and its arch-rival Intel.

According to Kevin Knox, vice president of AMD's commercial business, the major server vendors will start shipping the new quad-core offerings starting the next month. Hewlett-Packard was one of the first server vendors to announce an eight-processor system that will ship in May. The ProLiant DL785 will be able to run 32 CPU cores, which would open new opportunities to enterprises worldwide.

AMD's VP of commercial business said that, despite the fact that the company had to delay Barcelona shipments for about six months, it was a great learning experience, that reflects in the B3 silicon stepping.

"The errata was around TLBs and that has a big impact on virtualization. The B2 has given us pretty strong learnings. We're actually feeling pretty good with the learnings from B2 and we're on track with B3."

The company started touting its Barcelona offering right after Intel went public with its roadmap that includes the upcoming 6-core Dunnington chips, slated for release in the second quarter of the year. However, Knox considers that six cores cannot deliver extended performance over the quad-core counterparts, because there is no especially-tailored software to take advantage of all the cores.

"Six cores is interesting," he said. "Again, I'm not convinced there's a gigantic market of applications that want to exploit that number."
Moreover, AMD's Shanghai chip built on the 45-nanometer process is scheduled to arrive in the second quarter too, and the chip manufacturer expects to deliver an eight-core version of the Shanghai silicon until 2009, in order to recover from the alleged handicap.