14 DAY TRIAL // Some time ago Advanced Micro Devices encountered some problems which led to a massive scandal concerning the so called "simulated benchmarks" of the quad core processors and now with only days to go before the official launch of said processors, Michael Dell, the founder of the Dell company talks about the strong points of the AMD Barcelona central processing units.
Michael Dell talked about the potential of the AMD's Barcelona quad core processors when compared to existing Intel solutions and he said that sometimes the AMD design can be considerably faster than that of its competitor. "If you look at floating point instructions, Barcelona is about 30% faster than Clovertown. However, if you look at integer instructions, Clovertown is about 30% faster than Barcelona," said Dell's founder and he was cited by the news site xbitlabs. The scandal about AMD's benchmarks was a direct result of a series of results posted on the company's Web site which presented processors running at very high clock speeds that exceeded by far the ones that were officially announced for the September launch. While a number of complaints were registered about AMD using outdated Intel Xeon processors when performing their benchmarks it looks that in the case of the floating point performance department they were right from the start.
Dell's cofounder said that his company will continue to offer computing systems based on central processing units from both companies, AMD and Intel, as each company comes with a series of strong and weak point, so no single processor can satisfy the demands of all customers. "Depending on the type of application you are running or even your theory of computer science, you might have a preference for one type of server or another," claimed Michael Dell. Apart from these, Dell thinks that a computer manufacturing company should have at least two suppliers for every hardware part, including processing units.
Advanced Micro Devices is very close to launching a native quad core processor family with the Barcelona codename using an advanced 65 nanometer fabrication technology and among the highlights of the new CPUs there are a shared 2MB third level cache memory, an 128-bit floating point units (FPU for short),extended support for the SSE4A instructions, support for dual-channel DDR2 memory and other innovations. 10th of September marks the day for the officially announced launch date for these quad core central processing units and while in the first phase the clock speeds will be pretty low, later they will be gradually increased.