re: You don't seriously think that'll stop them from using those parts for the comparison?
It would be a serious marketing and financial blunder if they do. Here's one of many articles that gave the "40% faster than Xeon 5355" claim at the same time promising no increase in power dissipation.
news.softpedia.com
Brent Kirby, Opteron product manager, states that Barcelona
will outpace a dual-core Opteron by between 60 to 80% at any given clock speed. Likewise, compared to Intel's fastest Xeon 5300, AMD promises that Barcelona will be about 40% faster in a series of applications. HINT: "series of applications" probably SPECfp
Barcelona is already notorious for its low-power specification, being expected to come in the same packages as today's dual-core CPUs. Regular desktop quad-core CPU could still be running at a thermal design power of 95 watts, but the server-oriented "HE" versions will be rated at 68 watts. Since Barcelona is specially designed for the socket F server platform, companies will be able to simply replace current socket F dual-core Opterons with the new quad-core CPUs, without having to worry about design or heat issues. AMD claims that the typical TDP factor of its new CPUs will be about 15% lower than the current TDP provided with Intel's dual and quad-cores, which would make for power consumption of less than 58 watts in the case of a Barcelona CPU. [I don't think AMD was promising anything about Barcelona HE parts, so 58 watts is wrong. But this quote does show that the 40% number and the "same TDP as Opteron" promise are simultaneously promoted, making your 120 watt assumption unsupportable.]
Here's another:
blogs.zdnet.com
According to AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products, Randy Allen, AMD expects "Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent." AMD achieve this performance while maintaining a thermal and electrical envelope identical to existing dual core Opteron processors.
Again, 120W Barcelona is just your fantasy.
Petz |
