AMD Launches Barcelona Processor

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) released its next-generation Opteron chip today, to compete with rival chipmaker Intel. The chip, codenamed Barcelona, is a quad-core processor, which has four central processing engines. It's already shipping in computer systems made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Intel, AMD's rival, released its revamped Xeon server processors last week to compete with Barcelona, which is aimed at server systems. Intel once had captured the market until AMD released its first Opteron processors in 2003, but Intel eventually countered with faster products. The Opteron chip is up to 70 percent faster than previous chips, but uses the same amount of power.