First system vendors demonstrating AMD's Barcelona processor

Taipei (Taiwan) - Barcelona is making a first careful, public debut at Computex 2007. The processor has not been announced, but AMD and some of its partners are demonstrating server systems at the tradeshow.

Among the first vendors to show the new Opteron quad-core are Supermicro, Uniwide and Tyan. While the features of the processor have been discussed for some time, we are now seeing some real world applications of the CPU. Supermicro, for example, says it will offer a 4-socket blade server, which will house 160 cores (40 processors) in each 7U enclosure - and up to 960 cores (240 processors) per rack.

There was no information when Barcelona will be introduced. The official word from AMD is still that the new quad-core CPU will come by mid-year - with the desktop quad-core Phenom following two or three months later.