AMD Execs Talk R600 Models, Barcelona Benchmarks

SAN FRANCISCO—At a press and analyst briefing Feb. 28 in San Francisco, AMD executives discussed the companys road map for the remaining year and beyond, including new information on the forthcoming "Barcelona" and delayed R600 graphics launch.

In addition to the official release of AMDs first integrated ATI 690 chip set here Wednesday, execs on both the GPU and CPU side of the company reassured those in attendance that the R600 family and the Barcelona quad-core design are still on track for release during the first and second half of 2007, respectively.

AMD reveals more secrets about its Opteron chips, code-named Barcelona. The company says the "native" quad-core design is superior to Intels approach. Click here to read more.

According to Mario Rivas, executive vice president of AMDs Computing Products Group, the companys Barcelona will yield 42 percent better "floating-point" performance than Intels Xeon X5355 Clovertown in SPEC_fp benchmark tests.

For SPEC_int, which measures integer-processing tasks, Barcelona will have a leg up on Clovertown again with a performance advantage of more than 10 percent, Rivas said.

"Theres speculation about whats going on with [the] CPU business," said Henri Richard, Advanced Micro Devices executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer. "Wheres Barcelona? I can tell you its more of a killer product than anyone thought. Im not bragging. I know what weve got."

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