It's Barcelona, ladies and gents

Thrax

It's been hyped.
Delayed.
Hyped.
Delayed.
Hyped some more.
Delayed.

And now here's the straight scoop:

It's not all that impressive. In benchmarks that should leverage Barcelona's much-touted performance over Intel chips, which should have been vast if AMD was smart, such is not the case.

Consider TG Daily's analysis of the Barcelona which has this to say regarding the Barcelona's preliminary performance:

<i>"On the performance benchmarks we've seen so far, WinRAR shows Barcelona's biggest win over Xeon with something around a 15% increase. AMD's other wins typically come with small margins below 6%, and typically 2% or less in real-world benchmarks. And in the cases where Barcelona lost, it often lost by 10% or more, sometimes even with previous generation Xeons. In one test, Barcelona consumed 188 watts at idle and 299 watts max."</i>

And review samples are notably scarce, leaving premiere reviewers with benchmarchitecture in the form of powerpoint slides. AMD, please try harder -- we need you to.

muddocktor

And for another site's review of Barcelona, here is Anandtech's Barcelona review for you to look at. And check out the cpu-z shot of the 2.5 ES model they tested with and check the vcore it's running at; 1.52v in this Phenom preview that Anandtech also did. I am hoping that that vcore number is just a bad reading by cpu-z, but it could also be right and is showing the weakness of present Barcelona production in higher clock speeds in this ES stepping.

primesuspect

Jon Stokes has (as usual) an interesting take on the "reviews" over at Ars.

He's saying that reviewers got the shaft from AMD by getting stuff too close to the NDA, and not having proper testbench systems. Apparently Jon believes that Barcelona will really start to shine in quad SOCKET configurations (16 cores +).