Whither Barcelona? Well, here ...

Barcelona vs Xeon. 2.0 GHz Barcelona vs 2.33 GHz Clovertown. Punchline: SpecFP 78 for Barcelona, 60 for Xeon. Must be an old video. Xeon 5345 is not the highest performing Xeon, that is the 5365 at 3 GHz. About 29% “faster” than the 2.33 GHz version. This should put the 3 GHz Xeon on performance parity with the 2GHz Barcelona. But the Barcelona has a better memory system. And a better internal processor “bus” (yeah, not a bus, but a fabric). I expect Intel to push its next processor out the door real soon now. Possibly before Barcelona officially hits servers. If AMD is going to do something smart post-Barcelona, they would take two Barcelona die and put them on a multi-chip module, joining the dies together via hypertransport. 8 cores, very little engineering, just packaging. Out the door before Nehalem from Intel. Otherwise, the “tic tock” will likely do a number on them. In this case, you don’t have to be technologically purely better, just deliver on approximately the thing your customers want before the other guy. I wonder (though I doubt) whether AMD has learned this lesson over Clovertown this past year. It doesn’t matter that Clovertown was 2 woodcrest side by side with some glue logic. Intel won there. We will see in the next few months if AMD learned that lesson.