Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) showed a laboratory version of its promised "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron 8000 server chip to analysts gathered in Berkeley, California, on Thursday, and said it plans to begin selling the product in the second quarter of 2007.

AMD will pitch the chip to users of high-end, commercial workstations and servers, who could see performance improvements of up to 70 percent in database applications and 40 percent in floating-point applications compared to AMD's dual-core "Rev F" Opteron.

The demonstration was AMD's second effort Thursday to show that it is keeping up with quad-core chips from rival Intel Corp. AMD also launched its "4x4" Quad FX Platform, a motherboard with two dual-core Athlon 64 FX-70 series chips intended for the desktop gaming market.

Intel lost significant market share to AMD in 2006 as it was criticized for being slow to produce chips that emphasized power efficiency instead of pure calculating speed. Intel has bounced back in recent months with the launch of dual-core chips including the Core 2 Duo for desktops and Xeon 5100 "Woodcrest" for servers. On Nov. 14 Intel reached the market first with quad-core chips, with the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 for gamers and Xeon 5300 for servers.

Intel has also led the industry in converting its chip designs from the 90-nanometer process to 65 nm, including all four processors mentioned above. In response, AMD has criticized Intel's quad-core design as merely gluing two dual-core Woodcrest chips together, whereas the Barcelona chip includes all four cores on a single piece of silicon. Analysts are divided on the impact of that distinction, and say they cannot measure the difference until they compare benchmarks from both finished versions.

Still, AMD trumpeted Barcelona as an engineering achievement that marks the company's shift to 65-nm architecture. By shrinking the processor die, AMD is able to improve power efficiency and squeeze an extra level of shared cache memory onto the design, said John Fruehe, AMD's worldwide market development manager for server and workstation products.

"As you add more cores, it becomes less about brute force and more about the efficiency of how many things you can do at once, and how efficiently you can order them," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.