Barcelona, technical details

On the technical side, AMD has chosen a very different road to quad-core. Integrating all four cores under one roof, the Barcelona chip will reserve 64 kB of L1 cache and 512 kB of L2 cache for each core, which, according to the company, will avoid access conflicts that can happen in shared caches (Intel claims that its "SmartCache" avoids such conflicts in shared caches as well). Barcelona will also use a shares 2 MB L3 cache, which can be expanded "at the right time."

The 65 nm - Barcelona will be the first 65 nm Opteron processor - architecture also integrates Hypertransport links with a bandwidth of up to 8 GB, dual 128-bit SSE data interfaces, a new crossbar design, enhanced power management, and support for DDR2 memory. Comparable to Intel's Core technology, AMD is able to control the load on each processor core. If there is no need to use all four cores, only one, two or three cores will be filled up with data, which causes one or more cores to sit idle. As a result, power consumption can drop dramatically (see slideshow for details).

AMD chief sales & marketing officer Henri Richard compares AMD's "Barcelona" Opteron quad-core (left) to Intel's dual-die Clovertown (Xeon 5300) quad-core CPU.

AMD has not provided performance data for Barcelona, but initial presentations let us believe that AMD is not only aiming to match Intel's Clovertown processor. Barcelona is positioned as a new, scalable platform that could carry AMD for some time. On the desktop side, Barcelona is related to the Agena FX (Athlon 64 FX) and Agena (Athlon 64 X2) processors, which are scheduled to be released in early Q3 2007. Agena cores will be clocked between 2.7 GHz and 2.9 GHz, will be manufactured in 65 nm and also use socket 1207.

Intel's roadmap, on the other side, could indicate that the company is either in a wait-and-see state or is now focusing all its resources on the 45 nm processor launch, which is scheduled for late 2007/early 2008. The "Penryn" core will end up in a range of new processors, including the desktop processors "Bloomfield" (quad-core, single-die), "Yorkfield" (8-core, dual-die) and Ridgefield (dual-core, single-die). AMD will not be able to match Intel's 45 nm technology at least until mid-2008. Sources indicate that the Penryn core will bring a substantial improvement in processing performance.

At least from today's view, AMD has an opportunity to make up lost ground and regain technology lead for at least six months in 2007. The open questions are how strong Intel's Penryn will be and how AMD's strategy to integrate ATI technology into its platforms will develop over the next 12 to 24 months.