AMD shares Barcelona results

From c|net’s News.com:

AMD demonstrated its Barcelona quad-core server chip for reporters and analysts here Monday, comparing its performance to one of AMD’s dual-core Opteron processors. This marked the first time AMD shared Barcelona performance information with anyone outside of its server partners and internal folks, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president for server and workstations at AMD.

The story’s angle is that the Barcelona performance was compared a dual core Opteron and the Barcelona was, not surprisingly, faster.

AMD did not test Barcelona’s performance against one of Intel’s quad-core Clovertown Xeon processors, but Allen said Barcelona “will be the highest-performing x86 chip out there. It will blow away Clovertown.”

Unfortunately for AMD Intel’s Penryn is set for launch soon after Barcelona arrives. The company did not speculate on how well Barcelona would stand up against Penryn. I suppose they could be hoping for another Intel delay.