First round of events in Barcelona has finished and all the „aces“ that Barcelona, AMD's first native quad-core, has to offer are out. Today, we'll find out more details about this server processor from David Greenlaw, head of AMD's integration process.

Judging by what we see, press is not disappointed nor astonished, so we'll have to wait for the real-life testing.

Virtualization, performance, protecting the investors and power saving are key words for today.

AMD believes that those words are the key for Barcelona dominance over the competition. We've seen a couple of pictures that show AMD's superior clock efficacy in comparison to Xeons or older AMD K8 generation. Benchmarks were a little bit biased though, so each result can be interpreted in a good way or in a bad way, but for now, let’s leave AMD to their celebration.

The reason for celebration is this little baby that Dirk Mayer is holding.

 

On the picture above, you see a wafer with Barcelona processors and the face of a happy man. We found out that the CPU has about 463 million transistors on it and that the whole wafer consists of over 100 billion transistors – and that implies that the wafer should contain about 215 Barcelona cores on a single waffer.

It wouldn’t hurt AMD if the CPU’s ran at higher clock speeds than introduced 2.0GHz, but to their luck, talks of 2.5GHZ clock have already begun but AMD needs 3GHz+ parts as soon as yesterday.