Monday, September 10, is the big day when AMD officially unveils the Barcelona Quad-Core platform, which should have been launched at the end of August.

This would be a premiere for the 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 targeted September as the month when the first systems that pack native quad-core processors ship to customers. According to the company, due to their enhanced architecture, Quad-Core AMD Opteron (code-named Barcelona) 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. However, the speed will increase by the end of this year to 2.3GHz, according to Randy Allen, vice president of AMD's server and workstation division, who spoke to Alexander Wolfe, from InformationWeek.

"[There's] a lot of anticipation around this product introduction, because it is the most advanced X86 server processor that's ever been designed, developed, and sold. What we expect to deliver to the market," Allen said. "We've made public statements that we’ll be introducing frequencies of 2.3 GHz and above, so that we'll be able to quickly improve the performance of Barcelona."

He added that AMD’s state-of-the-art Dresden Fab has already begun shipping CPUs to partners and that "we'll be introducing the 45-nm version of our server processors in the second half of '08."

"We're shipping the processor today [September 7]. We expect most of the server OEMs to be bringing products to market in Q4, not on the launch date. But what we have is, over 50 platforms that utilize the socket 1207. And Barcelona is socket-compatible. It drops right into those platforms. So that makes for a very low barrier for [the OEMs] to take their existing platforms and to enhance them with this quad-core processor."

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.

Hitting at rival Intel, AMD's Steve Demski, product manager for AMD Opteron, said that Barcelona is the first true quad-core platform available today on the market, and that Intel’s offering is basically composed of two dual-core processors united on a single die.

"Basically [Intel is] taking dual-core dyes and essentially packaging those two things together. You're not giving the market a quad-core, you're giving the market two dual cores that are patched together. So from a technology standpoint, there is nothing new there."

Intel responded through the voice of Kennedy Brown, Xeon expandable product line manager:

"[AMD is] trying to claim that by putting the four cores on one piece of silicon, it's a superior product. They're having to do that because to some extent, they're nearly a year late, so that's why it appears that they're grasping at straws."

"The reality is, that really doesn't matter, we've already shipped millions of our quad cores using a dual dye approach and customers really care about overall performance," he said.

During Advanced Micro Devices’ Technology Analyst Meeting in July, 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.

However, Intel recently updated its line of Xeon quads, with the introduction of X7350 (2.93GHz, 8MB level 3 cache) which consumes only 130 watts and has been in the making for more than 19 months. According to a (yet) unofficial comparison, things don’t look too good for AMD, which falls behind both the Clovertown and Tigerton models.