AMD officially announces its long awaited Barcelona processor for servers and workstation.
In the X86 processor world, the two market leaders uses different approaches. AMD's Quad Core Opteron is the first with 4 processors fused in one chip while Intel's Xeon or Core 2 Quad uses two Dual core processors and fused them into one unit. AMD's native quad core seems to be the talk of the day, proclaiming superiority over it's rival Intel.
The Barcelona has 4 individual cores with dedicated L1 (64KB) and L2 (512KB). It also has a 2MB L3 and integrated DDR2 memory controller. Barcelona is built on 65nm SOI technology and ha 2MB L3. The 2300 series (max 2) and 8300 series (max 8). There is also a HE edition clocked at 1.7GHz, max 2.0GHz. It seems like all the CLKs are within or in the range of 2GHz. Optimisations are made to improve the memory performance by up to 50%
The new processor uses Dual Dynamic Power Management(DDPM). AMD ACP(Average CPU Power)，is now used to describe power consumption instead of TDP which means the max wattage consumed. ACP basically is calculated based on the average consumption when running business applications, Hypertransport's consumption, cpu consumption, memory controller consumption. Barcelona's ACP is rated as 55W and 75W。
Current dual core servers can be upgraded to run the new processors with a BIOS update.
AMD officially announces Quad Core Barcelona
