About 12 hours ago AMD showcased its first Barcelona quad-core systems at Computex 2007. The news itself was by no means shocking (since everyone expected AMD to do just that) but it turned some heads nonetheless. Especially since AMD's engineers took the liberty to showcase a 64-bit version of Windows 2003 Entreprise edition running on AMD's quad-core machine clocked at 1.6GHz.


While initially there were no benchmarks performed, the fact that Barcelona was able to work as a normal Opteron CPU (since it is drop in compatible with Opterons and the DDR2 memory controller) produced the "It Really Works" effect AMD was expecting. Barcelona ran on an nForce Professional 3400 chipset alongside with 4GB of DDR2-667 Ram.

However since everyone was also expecting for AMD CPUs to "wipe the floor with INTEL" in terms of multi-CPU performance the guys at DailyTech managed to get their hands on the Barcelona based system and ran a Cinebench on it in order to see some actual numbers.

The same benchmark also ran on a Xeon X3220 @ 2.4GHz (4GB DDR2-800, INTEL Garlow platform) quad core machine. The Barcelona based quad-core system finished the job in 27s (which is good for 1.6GHz) but still trailed behind the quad core Xeon which managed to finish the same job in only 17s. And that's 10 seconds faster than the 1.6GHz Barcelona CPU.

In terms of percentage, the quad core Xeon was 58% faster but it also had the advantage of a 50% clockspeed increase over the 1.6GHz Barcelona core. If one were to translate that in equal clock comparison Barcelona and Xeon would be approximately equal (at least in Cinebench). And that makes things even more interesting since AMD and INTEL managed to produce almost equal contenders from the first time in the recent history of CPUs. Works for me.

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