Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[fujiyama]

It might seem small, but it may be enough to retain leadership in those benchmarks

AMD is trying to maintain power consumption on lowest possible level. Keeping power envelope is more important than performance lead. Barcelona at this speed can be 1% faster with 40% lower power reqs. This is the main goal and this is what customers are expecting. With 65/95W quad-core we should expect passive cooling - another reason to buy Barcelona.

Barcelona derivatives are going to keep this envelope in 2008 with larger L3 cache sizes thanks to 45nm probably and HT3 which obviously consumes more power.