14 DAY TRIAL // On the brink of evolution/extinction, AMD is releasing some interesting performance updates for its Barcelona series of processors. Today is the 23rd of April, the day AMD is going to unveil the R600 graphics chipset and corresponding graphics cards and a new series of x86 processors. This may also be the beginning of the end, for if their marketing strategy doesn't pay off, they would be left in the gutter and Intel will once again rule over the x86 CPU market.
AMD however is betting everything on one big card, which they have begun playing, by introducing the new Barcelona specs they got from SPECcpu2006 benchmarks. In these tests, Barcelona-based processors are expected to have "up to a 50 percent advantage in floating point performance and 20 percent in integer performance over the competition's highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency". Giving the fact that AMD has taken another stab at Intel, without actually disclosing anything, is remarkable; I for one, would have expected that any other company, in their position, would do something more about the performance gap.
Intel is in the lead; they are aware of that and want to stay there, for a long time, so what do they do? They allow their Penryn processors to be field tested by connaisseurs in order for the people that will actually buy the processors, to know what they are buying. That is one unnecessary, but nevertheless inspired, move from Intel, one that would further increase the balance to their side, by adding the "trustworthy" factor to it. AMD on the other hand has celebrated four years of Opteron, the 23rd of April 2003 being the first time their processors saw the light of day. They have also announced widespread availability for the AMD Opteron 2222 and 8222SE dual core server processors starting today.
Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Business, AMD said: "Today's announcement further demonstrates AMD's commitment to delivering excellence and represents continued innovation along the customer-directed path we blazed four years ago; we provide the complete x86 processor architectural standard others in the industry are trying to emulate and we have planned a seamless upgrade path to native quad-core for delivery to the market in mid-year. With our native quad-core technology, AMD continues to build off of a consistent architecture and will deliver more than just four processing cores. We believe our enhanced architecture will deliver increased performance and performance-per-watt without forcing disruptive platform transitions. Investment protection continues to be a central focus of our customer-centric design principles."