AMD reinvents the x86

[Lazybones]

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/07/07OPcurve_1.html?source=NLC-CURVE&cgd=2007-02-08

AMD?s next-generation processor line, code-named Torrenza, has gone from a block diagram to living, breathing silicon. The first incarnation of AMD?s redesigned x86 CPU is Barcelona, that which your non-co-readers will call quad-core Opteron. Barcelona is genius, a genuinely new CPU that frees itself entirely of the millstone of the Pentium legacy. It?ll do the same for you.

Intel's Core2 has taken the current gen, but Barcelona sounds like it could be the new king.

[Tom]

I've heard conflicting reports "performance" wise. I'll have to wait till full release and some decent benchmarks are out before knowing what to believe.

[Cova]

The author doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.  Barcelona is NOT a redesign, it's a slightly modified K8 core, and happens to carry the code-name K8L.  While the 128-bit SSE sounds interesting for certain applications (SSL encryption does make a HUGE performance impact on web servers, especially ones with mostly static content), nested page tables has already been implemented by Intel as part of their virtualization technology, ATI and nVidia both have power-saving technology that can turn off parts of a core (GPU's have many more parallel parts, so it's more useful for them), and the quad-core Intel chips also have L3 cache's.

I'm still a pro-AMD guy, and I would recommend waiting for Barcelona if you were in the market for a server, but that article reads like something written by AMD's PR department, not an independent news site.