AMD's Barcelona to arrive in August

AMD fans have been waiting a long time for this: The chipmaker's great white hope, the native quad-core Barcelona chip, will land on desktops in August.

Going by the name of "Quad-Core Opteron," the first Barcelona chips will run at up to 2Ghz and will be available in standard and low-power versions. Faster versions of the chips will become available during the fourth quarter of this year, with the first Barcelona servers set to land in September.

"More than ever before, customers are expecting energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt leadership as much as absolute performance. With this new reality of computing, greater performance at the expense of greater power consumption is no longer an option," said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division at AMD. "AMD has prioritized production of our low power and standard power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen."

Let's hope that he's right. After all AMD has a lot riding on this chip and as we've seen, Intel has had plenty of time to prepare the competition.

For more on Barcelona:
- see this press release