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AMD Barcelona in Action
These pictures were taken only a few minutes ago. AMD showed off their Barcelona quad-core processors in action today in Monterrey, California. What you see in the pictures below are single processor and dual processor configurations, so a true "4x4" is now realized by AMD that looks very comfortable on an enthusiast desktop. And yes, those are Radeon X2900 XT video cards in the systems. Ian McNaughton showed off both systems encoding a 1080P trailer of Spiderman 3 to an H.264 format. On the dual quad-core Barcelona machine the encoding nearly ran real time. Extremely impressive. You will be seeing Barcelona in servers long before it finally gets to our desktops though.

The speed of the processors was not disclosed, but given the speed of the encoding done they were not "slow" processors by any stretch of the imagination. Sticking my hand into the machines and feeling the base of the CPU heatsinks, the slightest warmth was detected. The same went for the northbridge heatsinks in the systems as well.


Also shown off was a 300mm wafer that was composed of 45nm parts built in AMD's Fab 36 in Dresden, Germany.

I owe Anand a big "Thanks!" for letting me use his camera.

A 2.4GHz quad core Agena should equal a 3.36GHz Kentsfield
A 2.6GHz quad core Agena FX should equal a 3.64GHz Kentsfield XE.
A 2.8GHz dual core should equal a 3.9GHz Conroe