The key changes over the previous line are covered in brief here and in greater detail here. Most of the interesting features require the use of an upgraded CPU socket denoted by a "+" (e.g. Socket AM2+ or Socket F+), though the CPU will work in non-plus sockets on current motherboards. Some of the "plus socket" features are:
• Separated voltage planes allow the CPU to have a different voltage/frequency for each core and the northbridge.
• HyperTransport 3.0, allowing greater bus bandwidth, including support for DDR2-1066.
In addition, the Barcelona introduces a shared L3 cache, which should have a major impact on HPC applications.
One major issue, however, is an L3 TLB bug present in the first generation of this architecture. This problem can be solved by disabling part of the L3 TLB system in the BIOS or via software (with a 10% performance penalty), or using a unique Linux patch to route around the problem with limited slowdown (but the patch is not intended for production use). See the Phenom wikipedia article for details.
In short, while Intel retains the upper hand in horsepower now, the AMD Barcelona design seems to sport many of the features predicted for future system design.
More information:
Wikipedia's Barcelona article covers the architecture in depth.
Anandtech benchmarking puts the chip through its paces.
To find a Barcelona-based chip, see Wikipedia:
• Phenom quad-cores
• Barcelona-based dual-core Athlons (scroll to "Phenom based")
• Barcelona-based quad-core Opterons (23xx and 83xx)
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This recent "Innovations" article highlights "utility computing", the idea that virtualization, shared storage, and other technologies will come together to commoditize business computing.
While I agree with the general idea, the author predicts that this will marginalize IT as a field, which seems counter-intuitive. While this kind of computing does allow fewer people to manage more systems, it does make that management that much more complicated. Further, IT has always been about helping users as much as maintaining infrastructure. So I don't see the general IT realm getting eaten by other fields, but rather splintering into specialists in networking, storage, (virtual) system administration, support, etc.
Finally, I found this quote pretty funny:
Teenagers entering higher education today are already skilled at building personal application spaces on Facebook using software modules. It’s a small step to apply those principles to business applications.
"A small step" to go from facebook to a crucial business application? Seems unlikely.
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