Ed Brinker, an alert reader of RWT just pointed out that AMD has finally got their benchmarks together for Barcelona. They have now posted SPECint/FP results, although we are still missing SPECjbb2005 and TPC-C. Here's the deal:

SPECint2006 (base/peak)
AMD 1.9GHz - 9.97/11.3 - Note 2 socket system
Intel 3GHz - 18.9/20.8 - Note 2 socket system
Intel 2GHz - 14.2/15.6 - Note 2 socket system

There are higher SPECint2006 scores for Intel, but they use some sort of OpenMP flags which makes me think they might have been doing something 'odd' and unreflective of the benchmark.

SPECfp2006 (base/peak)
AMD 1.9GHz - 10.7/11.2 - Note 2 socket system
Intel 3GHz - 18.4/21.4 - Note 2 socket system
Intel 2GHz - 14.5/16.9 - Note 2 socket system

Looking at these scores, it's easy to understand why AMD didn't want to show single threaded performance at the Barcelona launch as the numbers are fairly disappointing. The good news is that single threaded performance is less likely to be a key purchasing concern for servers, so this isn't necessarily a substantial problem for AMD.

However, it clearly does mean that AMD will need to increase the frequency substantially to keep competitive with Intel on the desktop, where single threaded performance is much more important. Given that they still have a fair amount of time before they launch on the desktop, I certainly hope AMD can get up to 2.8GHz in a dual core configuration.

I see dual core as being much more important for desktop, as I don't think QC is very prevalent or particularly useful at the moment. I also think that if the problems are related to thermal headroom, that AMD should be able to pull off 2.8GHz or more.

DK