AMD “Barcelona” Core Opterons Released

September 10, 2007 0 By Tad Reeves

Whoa – so today is the big day I’ve been waiting for, for like a year.

I’ve been an AMD fan for close to 10 years now, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the new native quad-core Opterons (or, really, the quad-core Phenoms!)  Now, they’re out.   For those who are so inclined, check out this hi-resolution die shot of the AMD Barcelona chip.

My favorite hardware review site, anandtech.com, just released a review of the new Opteron 2350, running some of the major server-type software, as compared to the Xeon 5160 and the Xeon E5350.

It looks like the 3DS Max Vista performance of the new Opteron is still trailing the Xeon E5350, but for everything else – clock-for-clock – AMD is once again in the lead.   SQL server, Java server, everything else – a 2.0Ghz quad-core Opteron can soundly handle just about anything from Intel, and at less money.

Makes me wonder what would happen if I were to put a pair of them into one of these Sun x2200’s that I have sitting in the data center.  There’s a lot of work one could get done with 8 fast cores in a box like that.

So, all of the naysayers who said AMD was finished can be soundly trumped by a few good benchmarks proving the absolute reverse.

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