Advanced Micro Devices plans to launch its Quad-Core Opteron processor Monday with a movie premiere-like event it hopes will recapture some of the buzz it had, but lost, beating Intel to market with the first dual-core processor in 2003.

AMD is hosting an event at the San Francisco studios of Lucasfilm, an AMD customer, to unveil its quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, which has four independently operating processing cores on one piece of silicon vs. Intel’s placing two dual-core processors on one piece of silicon.

That’s an important distinction, says Bruce Shaw, director of server and workstation product marketing at AMD.

With performance and power efficiency both top concerns of x86 server operators, Shaw says AMD’s “native” quad-core design provides more power flexibility than Intel’s pairing two cores together. AMD processor wattage can vary based on the workload of each core; with Intel’s design, power can vary only to two cores at a time.

“I’m able to apply better power management at the silicon level [with AMD]. Not every core needs to be running at the same speed at the same time,” he says.

AMD’s reputation at stake

Analysts say AMD needs Barcelona to rebuild its reputation as a viable challenger to the giant Intel. AMD scored a coup in 2003 beating Intel to market with its dual-core Opteron processor.

At first, only IBM used Opterons in one of its servers, but eventually HP, Dell and Sun followed. Intel responded, though, using its size and marketing muscle to prevail in a price war. AMD lost $1.7 billion over the last three quarters due, in large part, to Intel’s price pressure.

Intel attempted to steal the thunder from AMD’s Sept. 10 announcement with news Sept. 5 of server vendors using its new Xeon 7300 quad-core. Intel’s next-generation processor, code-named Penryn, is slated for release in the fourth quarter.

“We have clear leadership in performance, performance per watt and virtualization performance,” claims Diane Bryant, Intel’s vice president of digital enterprise and general manager of the server platforms group. “We believe our leadership will be sustained post Barcelona launch as well.”

Intel also counts HP, IBM, Dell and Sun as among the server vendors using or planning to use the Xeon 7300. AMD says that 50 server lines industry-wide will support Barcelona.