Barcelona will double the number of cores in rack servers without changing the power budget if server managers choose it rather than Intel's quad core chips, AMD announced at its latest press confidence in London yesterday.

The claims join AMD's change in emphasis from performance advantages, to the power savings Barcelona offers compared to Intel's quad cores.

"We were guilty of talking too much about native quad core designs versus multi-chip. Now we've changed the language a little bit to speak about the benefits of native design" said EMEA channel market development manager Felipe Payet.

His colleague Steve Demski, Opteron Product Manager, then went on to hype up power-savings offered by native design. Firstly he said comparing AMD's and Intel's Thermal Design Power (TDP) wasn't an apples to apples comparison, since AMD's TDP takes into account the memory controller, whereas Intel's memory controller resides in the Northbridge.

Demski also made some interesting observations regarding AMD's use of DDR2 memory, since it consumes far less power than Intel's FBDimms.

The difference in power is around 60 Watts for eight Dimms and is AMD's trump card in the server space.

The change in emphasis has also led to AMD only comparing Barcelona performance to Rev F (the latest dual-core) Opterons explicitly. AMD will no longer state that Barcelona will be faster than Intel, instead just stating it will be "competitive".

While this doesn't mean much in the server space (where performance per watt is king), it could be a sign that upcoming consumer quad-core chips won't be significantly faster.

The fastest Barcelona quad-cores will leave AMD at 2GHz, going to manufacturers in August and hitting retail in September. Higher-clocked quad cores will arrive in late 2007. Look out for a review soon.