AMD announced today that its Quad-Core Opteron processors, code-named “Barcelona,” are planned for shipment in both standard and low power versions at launch for later next month. This would be a premiere for Sunnyvale, CA-based chip manufacturer because it’s the first time AMD brings on the market both standard and low power parts as part of a new processor launch. 

AMD has also provided new details about the timing of “Barcelona” chips on the market and about the products that are currently being readied. AMD expects that the processors will begin shipping for revenue in August 2007, with systems from AMD platform partners beginning to ship in September 2007. According to AMD’s press statement, due to their enhanced architecture, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors can deliver significant performance and performance-per-watt enhancements over existing processor architectures yet are designed to be backwards compatible with existing AMD Opteron platforms. 

For the moment, Barcelona quad core chips will not surpass the speed of 2.0 Ghz, but AMD expects its processors to run at higher frequencies in Q4 2007 in both standard and SE (Special Edition) versions.

The new chips are designed to operate within the same thermal envelopes as current generation of Opteron processors, but AMD estimates that the new ones can provide a performance increase up to 70 percent on certain database applications and up to 40 percent on certain floating point applications, with subsequent higher frequency processors expected to significantly add to this performance advantage. 

During Advanced Micro Devices’ Technology Analyst Meeting, the company showed a comparison between its 2.0GHz quad-core Barcelona chip and an existing intel Xeon 5345 “Clovertown” chip running at 2.33 GHz.  Technically the AMD chip is a 95watt chip, while the Intel chip is an 80 watt chip, but they were really are both in the same energy framework, since the two firms measure energy use differently.    In AMD’s demo running the SPEC floating point benchmark, the Barcelona chip was scoring 69.5, while the Intel chip was at 54.  So AMD claims a 25 percent performance advantage; and when looking at actual power draw; 30 percent better at performance per watt.

“More than ever before, customers are expecting energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt leadership as much as absolute performance. With this new reality of computing, greater performance at the expense of greater power consumption is no longer an option,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division at AMD. 

“AMD has prioritized production of our low power and standard power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen.”