AMD Quad Core Opteron Barcelona to be launched in September

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AMD is planning to launch the industry’s first native quad-core processors, codenamed Barcelona, in September 3 months later than it was supposed to be. The processor is slated to be shipped to OEMs by August and will appear in systems in September. The news comes as Intel announced that shipments of its quad-core Xeon 5300 microprocessor have topped one million since its release in November.

This processor is the first AMD x86 chip to integrate four processing cores on a single die of silicon and remain compatible with earlier AMD processors. The processors will arrive in a variety of frequencies up to 2GHz, with higher-frequency standard and special-edition versions due to launch in the fourth quarter. AMD claims a up to 70 per cent on certain database applications and by up to 40 per cent on some floating point applications at the same thermal ratings of current Opterons.