[Retired Tech]

AMD is preparing a new micro-architecture for its quad core processors codenamed Barcelona that promise to further cut power consumption, the company unveiled at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

The company projected that the addition of its L3 cache would increase performance for applications such as web hosting, databases and email servers.

The improvements will allow the chip to outpace Intel's quad core processors by 40 per cent on average, AMD claimed.

The Barcelona chip is slated for availability in mid-2007.

[Advertisements]

Barcelona looks like it will be an amzing chip, good for gaming they say that in operations that games use alot performance over a C2D is somewhere in the 80% area which is impressive its not as strong as that in all areas but its pretty impressive, mid 2007 is also good dates right in time for my possible build.

[warriorscot]

Barcelona looks like it will be an amzing chip, good for gaming they say that in operations that games use alot performance over a C2D is somewhere in the 80% area which is impressive its not as strong as that in all areas but its pretty impressive, mid 2007 is also good dates right in time for my possible build.

[Hemal]

Put this together with a new DX10 graphics card and an ultimate copy of vista with atleast 2-4 gigs of high quality ram and that would be a sweet rig!

I cant wait

[rumble291]

4GB of RAM what a way to waste your money lol. 2GB on Vista should be fast!

[Spider-Man]

1GB of ram is required for Vista Ultimate, so I'd doubt that 2gb would be very fast. I'll aim for at least 3gb's - but I'll have to stop being a student and get a job first:( Does anyone know the intended L3 cache size or the Barcelona processors? With many dual core processors from both Intel and AMD having 4mb cache, just how large will the cache be in these processors?! I remember when I first took an interest into doing hardware upgrades only a few years ago and thought "Oh my God, an Athlon XP 2000!! No way, that's crazy speed!!!". Hmm, the future freaks me out.

[jrm20]

Yeah 3gb sounds like the "NEW" sweet-Spot for memory soon to come when all the new dx10 games start to get released.

[warriorscot]

2Gb would ve plenty fast vista is actually pretty nippy with nly 1 for a change a company gave real system requirements they are actually on the cautios side when it comes to vista. The only problem with 3 is its hard to implement as you need to either have odd numbers of memory sticks or max out the usualy 4 ram slots which even now motherboards still dont like all that much best performance and stability still comes in the matched pair so 2Gb is probably going to be the standard for a decent system for the next year or so at least until memory prices drop on 2gb single sticks. Games developers have really been putting alot of development into scalability and optimisation allot of new games run really well on older systems better than new games used to the developers are really thinking about the mid range PC crowd and some of the techniques they use to maximise memory usage is impressive.

[jrm20]

Oh yeah 2gb is plenty fast enough but 3gb will be the place for the "hardcore gamers" to be. LOL


Kinda like 1gb right now isnt fully enough for all games at the highest settings without it being too choppy, but 2gb is plenty..

Id just like to have 3gb on my next machine even though 2gb is plenty.