Barcelona is Out, and so is the Jury
Ever since Intel introduced their Core 2 Duo processors last year, it’s been nothing but hell for AMD. In order to stay competitive with their rapidly aging architecture, AMD was forced to drastically cut prices in order to present the customer with a better value than Intel. Knowing that they’d forced AMD into a corner, Intel made them sweat even more by cutting their own prices. Consumers couldn’t have been happier; the two market leaders were waging an all out price war, and they were reaping all the benefits. The situation was looking quite bleak for AMD, who still didn’t have a 65nm chip out while Intel was already announcing possible release dates for its new 45nm lineup.
After numerous complications and delays, AMD has finally shipped the industry’s “first native X86 quad-core mircoprocessor” lineup. As is traditionally the case, this first lineup of quad-core chips has been designed for server applications; expect to see the desktop oriented lineup, codenamed “Phenom,” as early as December, 2007.
Now that the chips are out of development and available in the market they have lost their “Barcelona” nickname, and are now know as the 2300-series and 8300-series of the existing Opteron lineup. As you may have guessed, the difference in the numbering corresponds to the difference in their performance and pricing. The 2300-series constitutes the affordably priced low-end, and looks something like this (“HE” stands for “High Efficiency”):
From the rushed analysis on a variety of early reviews, it would seem that the 2300-series provide excellent value in terms of price over performance, along with excellent efficiency. That being said, however, it would also seem that the 2300-series fails to regain the lead from Intel in terms of raw processing power, but that was to be expected. Early benchmarks suggest that the new Opteron parts perform better than their perspective Intel rivals when it comes to floating-point calculations, but fail when compared in terms of integer calculations. As it currently stands, the 2300-series is probably most appealing to those who already have compatible AMD systems and are in the market for a quick and easy upgrade – provided that their software scales easily from dual-core to quad.
Those yearning for AMD parts and good performance might want to look at the higher-end of the Opteron spectrum:
Unfortunately, there aren’t any hard numbers out yet on the true performance of the 8300-series, but AMD, however biased they might be, claims that its 2.0Ghz 8350 is capable of beating its 3.0GHz dual-core cousins by as much as 50 percent. Such claims, if true, will make for quite a few exciting benchmarks battle between AMD and Intel. For AMD’s sake, let’s hope that it’s one that the company can win, because if it can’t there will be even less hope once Intel unveils it’s new 45nm lineup. However, if these new chips manage to break even with Intel (that’s probably the best we can hope for at this point) it should allow AMD a little more breathing room while they regroup and refocus their efforts on some more high-end parts.
There is a lot of testing left to do, so plan on hearing more about “Barcelona” in the weeks to come.
Reviews Out So Far:
