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Barcelona employs several features to improve performance, Allen said. Among them:
• It's AMD's first chip with a built-in level-three cache. Cache memory can respond faster than main memory, and Intel has relied on large amounts of cache to improve its processors' performance. Each Barcelona core has its own 64-kilobyte first-level data cache, 64KB first-level instruction cache and 512KB second-level cache; and the four cores together share a 2MB third-level cache, though AMD has said that size can be increased.
• AMD redesigned the Barcelona core, marking the biggest changes since the company made its 2003 transition from its 32-bit Athlon chips to the current 64-bit lineup. The magnitude of the transition is about halfway between the small tweaks AMD has made to Opteron over the years and the clean-sheet redesign Intel employed in moving from NetBurst to its current Core design, Allen said.
• A faster floating-point engine performs mathematical calculations--long an Opteron strong suit, though not as important a part of the chip as that for integer operations. At a given clock frequency, a Barcelona core outperforms a current Opteron core by a factor of 1.8. By going quad-core, a Barcelona chip overall will provide a boost factor of 3.6, Allen said.
Not all things are better, though. Specifically, Barcelona's clock frequency will be lower than that for the company's dual-core chips. That's a common situation because quad-core chips require more circuitry, and more circuitry means more power consumption and waste heat, unless the chips run slower.
AMD is moving its manufacturing from a 90-nanometer process to a 65-nanometer process, permitting more circuitry to fit in a given amount of chip real estate. Even with that change, the quad-core chips will run more slowly, Allen said. He argued that it's worth the tradeoff, though, since the additional cores can run more jobs simultaneously, even if an individual job isn't completed as swiftly.
"The slight degradation for frequency with quad-core will be overwhelmed by the increase in performance from dual-core to quad-core," Allen said. He declined to mention the chips' frequency.
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- Barcelona will not be competing with Clovertown
- Throughout 2006 Intel managed to pull in just about every single product launch on their roadmap and with the recent announcement of their 45nm first silicon able to boot up 4 different operating systems there is no reason to believe that they are busy at work trying to pull in 2007 and 2008 product launches as well. It's one thing to compare Barcelona to current dual and quad core Intel CPUs but nothing is being said about comparisons to next generation 45nm Intel CPUs that should be arriving at the same time or soon after the Barcelona launch namely Wolfdale, Bloomfield, and Yorkfiled. Barcelona will have new technology and more cache but so will Intel's new 45nm CPUs - from 3MB L2 up to 12MB L2, up to 8 cores, new CSI high speed interconnect, and maybe even an integrated memory controller (although Intel's Core CPU architecture has already demonstrated superior memory performance compared to AMD's integrated memory controller on real world applications). Also, what is after Barcelona? HT 3.0, DDR3, Fuzion? http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/12/14/amd_questions_multi_core_trend/ It doesn't look like AMD has much compared to Intel's next 2 generations Nehalem and Gesher - not to mention all of the product shrinks and optimizations in between.
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