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.Each of Barcelona’s four cores incorporates a new vector math unit referred to as SSE128 (128-bit streaming single-instruction-multiple-data extensions). I am aware that you only do quantum physics on weekends, but the potential for hardcore IT tasks such as encryption, compression, real-time analysis of high volumes of streaming business transactions, and wire-speed packet analysis is also the stuff of science fiction. Barcelona gives floating point operations their own schedulers (checkout lanes) and runs them twice as fast as 64-bit SSE did. AMD claims that Barcelona’s per-core floating point performance is more than 80 percent faster than the present Opteron. Benchmark that. And separating integer and floating-point schedulers also accelerates this thing called virtualization, which you may notice is a recurring theme for Barcelona.
