Pat Patla, director of AMD's server workstation division, states that Barcelona is a new processor design, 90 per cent of which is brand new. Patla reckons the CPU will make AMD the first company to deliver a native quad-core X86 chip. "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform [Intel's] Clovertown by 40 percent," said AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products, Randy Allen.

AMD's Barcelona quad-core CPUs will be produced through a 65nm manufacturing process and the company also claims that they will have the same thermal and electrical envelope as existing dual-core Opterons. The upcoming CPUs are said to include 2MB of shared L3 cache as well as AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology for X86 virtualization. Barcelona CPUs will be compatible with existing Socket F systems and will only require a minor BIOS update for system compatibility. As far as compatibility is concerned, users will be able to simply pull out the old dual-core silicon and slip in a four-core Barcelona chip and even re-use their old cooler, should they choose.

Rival company Intel keeps its cool and Technology Business Research's John Spooner claims that Intel Clovertown CPU "has allowed Intel to put some pricing pressure on AMD. Intel can tout a lower price per core, given that it's pricing much of the quad-core Xeon 5300 line the same as its dual-core Xeon 5100 chips." AMD can't get too intimidated, preparing to fight back with its native quad-core Barcelona processors in mid 2007. Intel's quad-core chips put two dual-core chips onto a single package while AMD's approach has one quad-core chip on a single package.

As soon as AMD introduces its native quad-cores, the company plans to shift its focus to 16-core systems.