AMD launched its first quad-core chip at an event in Barcelona today, paving the way for better performing processors for servers and (ultimately) for desktop PCs.

The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor (originally codenamed Barcelona), comes as no surprise. But AMD spent this afternoon's keynote speech stressing the energy efficiency of its new 'native quad-core' Opteron.

Barcelona & 'the new AMD'

Alberto Macchi, AMD's corporate vice president for sales and marketing in Europe, said that the new chip marked "a great day" for what the chip maker's top execs are calling "the new AMD".

Macchi reckons the new chip will "redefine [the] market". Macchi is referring to the server market here, for Opteron is a server product. But AMD is using its launch event to look beyond Barcelona and hint at its "next generation of processors". That's because the architecture of its new Opteron chip will be reproduced in the desktop-targeted Phenom products due later in the year.

AMD is also talking up the low energy consumption of its new processor.

"[Barcelona has] the best energy efficiency in the market," said Macchi during his presentation. He then went onto explain how this efficiency is achieved through a variety of new integrated technologies, including CoolCore Technology and Dual Dynamic Power Management.

Advanced power management

CoolCore Technology reduces overall energy consumption in the new chip by turning off unused parts of the processor. AMD's Independent Dynamic Core Technology, meanwhile, is an enhancement to PowerNow. It enables each core on the processor to vary its clock frequency depending on the specific performance requirement of the applications it is supporting.

Finally, Dual Dynamic Power Management (DDPM) provides an independent power supply to the cores and to the memory controller. It allows the cores and memory controllers to operate on different voltages, determined by usage.

Barcelona is a crucial product for AMD and its reputation has been boosted by the fact that it has beaten Intel to native quad-core production. 'Native' quad-core is the process where all four cores are produced on a single die. Compare this with Intel's existing 'packaged' quad-core chips, which are basically made from two dual-core chips stuck together.

Consequently, AMD reckons that the new Barcelona chip has a 50 per cent increase in integer and floating-point performance over its predecessors.

AMD's best ever processor

Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and chief operating officer, said that the launch of Barcelona was "a phenomenally exciting day. I'm really excited to be in Barcelona". He then called the new processor AMD's "best ever".

Referring to the bad-old days of poor performance-per-watt processing, Meyer added: "there was a never-ending quest for clockspeed over energy efficiency. We took a step back. We see the potential for heterogeneous processing - greater performance at lower and lower power levels... watch this space."

Meyer then held up a wafer of Barcelona silicon, enthusing that: "the human race should be proud. We can build 600 million transistors on a chip and get 'em all to work". He added that there was an incredible 100 billion transistors on the wafer he was holding.

As well as power efficiency, AMD's big sell on Barcelona is the benefit to system builders and customers in terms of upgradeability. The new chip uses the same platform as its dual-core predecessor, so systems can be easily upgraded to Barcelona.

Tech.co.uk is here at today's event in Spain, and we'll be reporting on the various speeches and sessions that take place today and tomorrow.