More AMD Barcelona Benchmarks Surface

"These performance numbers were based on systems using the Opteron 2356, or known to the world of us regular folks as AMD Quad Core at 2.3GHz. The price of this processor is currently set at $796 USD in quantities of 1000, so we'll see what can Clovertown at 2.66 GHz (Xeon 5355) do about it…

So, what will Barcelona deliver?

For starters, SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 speak the voice of doom for the 366 MHz faster clocked Xeon - and these are the reasons why Intel was downplaying performance of FP and praising the INT. These figures were from a few months ago, so things may well have changed since then. But in the Integer test, a Barcelona 2.3GHz yields 21% higher score than Clovertown 2.66 GHz, but Floating Point test leaves a staggering 50% performance deficit for Clovertown, and this is not something 45 nanometer Penryn can solve overnight. Unless, of course the clock deficit for AMD is such that Intel speeds past."