Intel Corp (INTC)

[TomH7259]

WOW!!! Barcelonas are running at 1.6Ghz!!


http://www.overclockers.com/tips01164/
What can you say? This is not a competitive chip at 1.6GHz. Now the Povray scores make sense (it should be noted that current AMD chips are pretty lousy at Povray, anyway). Some intrepid soul did manage to run a benchmark on the Barcelona machine before they "were instructed to leave," and well, they earned the page hit.

Assuming perfect scaling (and Cinebench pretty much does that), a Barcelona would have to run at 3.8GHz to match a 3.33GHz Penryn. I repeat, not 2.8, 3.8GHz. Given that the top speed of the initial Barcelonas looks to be (hope, hope, pray, pray) 2.3GHz, a quad-core Barc at that speed would only be about even with a dual-core Penryn.

If Cinebench is representative of what the Barcelona generation can do (and all the other indicators we have are pointing in the same direction), what we have is a slightly more tweaked Hammer, one that doesn't even look as tweaked as Penryn. Even if they get the clock speeds up to the levels promised, we're looking at catchup with C2Ds, then Penryns will reestablish the performance lead.