AMD readies quad-core Barcelona for August shipment

Those eager to lay down for the "industry's first" native x86 quad-core processor have but a few months left to wait, as AMD just announced that its quad-core Opteron's would begin shipping in August. Codenamed Barcelona, these CPUs will be launching in both "standard and low power versions," hit frequencies of up to 2GHz, and should provide performance increases of up to "70-percent" over existing Opterons in select applications. Additionally, those who can hold off a bit can look forward to even speedier chips in Q4 of this year, and an elusive "Special Edition" version should also be just around the bend. Per usual, no hints on what kind of premium you'll pay for this wee piece of silicon come August, but AMD did note that the processors wouldn't hit mainstream systems until September.

[Chuckles McGee @ Jun 29th 2007 2:29PM]

Wow, 70% percent faster than AMD's old stuff. How about telling us how much slower the new AMD chips are than the current Intel ones? Ohhh, right, they're doing that "marketing" thing, I forgot.

[Anders @ Jul 4th 2007 8:13PM]

well, seeing as how the new Core 2 Duos were found to be around 40% better than AMD's Athlons, it'll probably be 35-40% improvements.

[Chuckles McGee @ Jun 29th 2007 6:17PM]

Benchmarks don't seem that impressive...of course, these run at a low clock speed.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-First-AMD-K10-Barcelona-Benchmark-Results-are-Out-56597.shtml

[Ebzy @ Jun 29th 2007 7:14PM]

I really hope they have the software that can take all this sweet goodness to its fullest by that time. It really does see a shame that at the moment even the dual-cores are still not being used to their fullest.

[angelsvairwaves1 @ Jun 29th 2007 2:37PM]

speed? its very intersting you should use that term.

[pyro @ Jun 29th 2007 4:05PM]

the Q6600 for $250 in julyis too tempting for me to even wait for benchmarks for this.

[jim @ Jul 2nd 2007 12:26PM]

I am not as up to speed as I used to be on this stuff but I was under the impression that Intel has had quad-core stuff out there for quite a while. If the keyword in the "AMD Press Release" is "native" then I usually expect you guys, (Engadget) to point this stuff out, and possibly explain a bit about it.

What am I missing here?

[Steve Savage @ Jun 30th 2007 8:01PM]

It darn well better plug into an AM2 socket, or I'll be irked.