Watch out Intel, there's an uprising in Barcelona...

Final thoughts and further reading

AMD certainly appears bullish about Barcelona's chances of taking the fight to Intel and winning back market share.

It has an elegant interconnect architecture in the form of Direct Connect which should, assuming the cores are able to take advantage of it, give AMD the lead in applications that play to its strengths.

But Felipe Payet conceded that we aren't going to see a repeat of the original Opteron launch, where the Xeon suddenly looked decidedly second-rate. So, it won't be a walk-over but it should definitely be interesting.

Unfortunately we still don't have any real-world samples or performance numbers available to us. Until we do, it's hard to gauge just how competitive Barcelona is going to be across a broad range of workloads.

One thing's for certain, though, with Barcelona and Intel's Penryn both set to appear before the end of the year, there's one hell of a fight in prospect.

HEXUS related reading