AMD Barcelona Quad Cord to be released very soon.

Monday, Sept 10th, 2007 if the release date is correct.

Here is some Article Reading Homework for you guys to look at on the new AMD Quad Core Barcelona chip. It's the first true Quad core chip on one die (Intel's Quad core is two Dual Cores together on one die). Should make things interesting.

Supposed release date is Monday, Sept 10th, 2007 which is tomorrow.

AMD Opteron 2300 Series

Model / Core Frequency / TDP / Launch Price

2350 / 2.0 GHz / 95W / $372
2347 / 1.9 GHz / 95W / $312
2347 HE / 1.9 GHz / 68W / $372
2346 HE / 1.8 GHz / 68W / $251
2344 HE / 1.7 GHz / 68W / $206

Don't worry about the AMD Opteron 8300 Series
Unless you run web servers and the such. Not for home use.

I'm surprised AMD has been OK with allowing Intel to prance about their "quad core" chips without resistance. Same goes for 64bit processors. I know most of the market wouldn't understand the technical differences, but I'm sure many could be swayed by a little light cast on Intel's practices.

Hmm. I wonder how the 2346 HE, which seems to be priced more to the mainstream, clocks compared to the Q6600?
Also curious about it's OC'ing capabilities.

AMD still has a ways to go before recapturing their performance crown from intel, but such is the ebb and flow of the processor market.

Nice to see them waking up a bit since I have a computer upgrade somewhere down the line. Hopefully before the year is out, but it's not looking good.

They have a heck of a speed penalty, though... unless these things are just wildly more efficient per clock than existing Athlons, 2.0Ghz isn't gonna cut it for gamers. You'd be much better off with a Core2, even though their fundamental design isn't nearly as good.

At 3 gigahertz, those things would be very compelling, but at 2.... I don't really see why any home user would want one.

I decided a while ago to not get interested in Barcelona until I see benchmarks and average OC results with a retail chip. At the moment the only benchmarks anyone has seen have either been questionable as to their believability or pretty believable but with far from final hardware and very unimpressive.

I have been trying to look into the Barcelona and see if it will use the same socket AM2 as the dual cores prior on AMD socket mainboards. But the only thing I have found on the use of the AM2 socket with the Barcelona is humorously a commercial video showing how the AMD Opteron Dual Core system can be upgraded to the Opteron Quad Core system very easily by simply changing out the chipset bios and the two CPUs in the rack system. Hence if they use existing chipsets for the Opteron upgrade I believe they would do the same in the home consumer market. Since the AM2 socket was made for Dual Core processors I would think it would remain the same for the Quad Core.

FYI Found a tidbit on performance but take it with a grain of salt.

VNUnet.com came up with a video showing AMD Barcelona floating point scores when compared to Intel quad-core Clovertown at sub-90W Thermal envelope. In case of Intel, processor worked at 2.33 GHz (Xeon 5345), while Barcelona worked at 2.0 GHz (Opteron 2350). - Video Link

Keep in mind that is expected with the AMD processor. It has always outperformed Intel in the floating point processor area but came even on the integer processing areas. Although the energy efficiency might be a big selling point if it is indeed 30% more efficient.

I thought the quadcore was on AM2+ or it's successor.... either way they're all pin compatible.

Anyone found a good review of this yet?
-Xino

The Phenom, the desk-top version of the Barcelona is supposedly coming out in December. What we got now is the Opteron Barcelona server chips.

Let me say that anandtech knows their stuff. They actually had to simulate a desktop computer using server hardware which is interesting. What they got was as close as they can get to desktop benchmarks without using the Phenom chip in an actual desktop. So far it's the only thing I've found in the benchmark info.
AMD Phenom Preview: Barcelona Desktop Benchmarks