The DailyTech has an outstanding overview of Barcelona, describing what’s significant about the new chip in terms of AMD’s previous products, and how the chip compares with Intel’s quadcore offerings.
Two randomly selected excerpts:
Intels previously released Clovertown, Kentsfield and upcoming Harpertownand Yorkfieldquad-core processors feature two Core-architecture dies on a single package effectively quad-core, however, not a native design like Barcelona.
…
Barcelona-based processors feature a total of 4.5MB of on-die cache. In comparison, Intels Clovertown and Kentsfield quad-core architectures feature 64KB of L1-cache, 4MB of shared L2-cache per pair of cores for a total of 8.25MB on-die cache.
Well worth a read.