AMD's quad-core Barcelona processors are expected to be significantly faster than Intel's Clovertown, according to AMD. In an effort to regain some of the server market share from AMD, Intel released the Clovertown series of quad-core processors last November. The Xeon 5300 line (Clovertown) is aggressively priced and since Intel plans on pricing them the same as its dual core Xeon 5100 processors.

However, AMD strikes back with a native quad core 65nm processor, codenamed Barcelona, due for release later this year. Emphasizing on performance rather than pricing, AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products, Randy Allen, AMD expects "Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent."

While Intel went for a design that crammed two dual-core processors into a single package, AMD have built all four cores onto a single die. Barcelona will be a Socket F processor and will be compatible with existing Socket F motherboards after a BIOS flash. The processors will also feature 2MB of shared L3 cache as well as AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology for x86 virtualization.