According to PC World, it’s the tech industry’s worst-kept “secret”. AMD’s quad-core chip, codenamed Barcelona, is finally here. This thing wants to take on Intel’s quad cores with low power consumption and better price-for-performance, but has some shortcomings in the performance area.
I mean that Barcelona will not match up to Intel’s Core 2 Duo (Quads), till they bump up the CPU clock speeds up a bit more. This range of processors was also delivered half-an-year late, coz’ we’ve got a bunch of perfectionists sitting at AMD R&D. The gits would not settle with an MMC (Multi-chip module) like Intel. What Intel has done is that they’ve slapped two dual-cored together on a two dies and bridge them, and called it a quad-core, which technically is correct. However, AMD wanted to make it a “proper” chip, on a single die, WITH their usual memory controller AND HyperTransport bus. Also, this had to be done on a 65nm (read nanometer) scale design, which meant the same gits (AMD is smaller in size than Intel) had to redesign EVERYTHING. Well, it had to be late 
Also 600Mhz slower than originally planned 
These guys are trying to compete at the lower range of the market, and will slowly try to eat out Intel’s share. If they want to get serious, they should bump up the speeds.
Also, they lost their lead in the HPC (High Performance Computing) market to Intel’s “Tigerton” CPU. The thing has a 91% better performance according to SPEC_rate_int (I think?), which is used to benchmark CPUs. More on that later.
But…Barcelona has some pros, ya know. The things on a single piece of S (read silicon). So, it’s definitely gonna be more efficient than a 2xdual-core solution. Efficiency in terms of power consumption as well as heat dissipation. Add a memory controller and AMD’s proprietary HyperTransport FSB, and you get a nice package. This means that things are very efficient while interacting with one another, saving energy and blah, blah.
P.S. One of my favourite typos is ‘amd’ instead of ‘and’