Intel looks to bury AMD’s ‘elegant’ Barcelona Processor
Intel is betting on a combination of manufacturing prowess and pragmatic chip design to outsell Advanced Micro Devices’ upcoming quad-core Barcelona processor. Barcelona, slated for release later this year, is the next version of the Opteron and AMD’s answer to the dual-core Woodcrest and quad-core Clovertown Xeon processors introduced by Intel last year. Billed as a “true” quad-core chip, Barcelona has four processor cores on a single piece of silicon, or die, compared to Clovertown, which straps together twin dual-core dies inside a single package, yielding a quad-core processor.
“I think Barcelona could be an intellectually elegant chip. Will the market care if its cost is higher and it can’t ramp into volume at the [clock] frequency targets? Well, we’ll have to see,” he said For AMD’s part, the company is betting that the single-die Barcelona design will yield lower power consumption and offer higher performance than anything Intel can bring to market this year.
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