While troubled processor manufacturer AMD is struggling to bring out its new Barcelona chips as soon as possible, Santa Clara-behemoth Intel reports that more than 1 million quad-core processors have been sold since launch.

AMD announced that its new, quad core platform for servers, code-named Barcelona, will be out in the wild this August, with the first servers due to debut in September. Actually, Barcelona is the latest revision of the successful Opteron chips for servers, now packing four cores on one silicon die, and promises to run 40% faster than its predecessors when dealing with floating-point operations (mainly used in scientific projects) and 70% faster when dealing with certain types of databases. AMD also boasts with the fact that the aforementioned performance comes at the same amount of energy consumption.

AMD prepped two versions of quad-core chips: a standard version and a low-powered version, neither of which will surpass the 2 GHz speed. However, a higher-clocked, more powerful version is being crafted at AMD’s Texas facilities for later this year.

On the other side, Intel claims that its highly-praised quad-core CPUs for desktops and servers have surpassed the barrier of 1 million units sold, despite the hefty price. Built using the 65nm technology, Intel’s quad-core processors have been introduced in November last year, confirming Intel’s promise from September 22006 that in about 6 months they’ll sell 1 million quads before AMD launches any competitor.

The CPU that has driven sales is Xeon 5300 “Clovertown”, according to Intel representatives in the US and Asia.