Performance of current central processing units may impress, but nothing impresses more than the speed of the forthcoming products. Both Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corp. have released SPECfp_rate2006 and SPECint_rate2006 test results of their unreleased processors recently on their web-sites to impress the public.

If SPEC benchmark results published by AMD and Intel are to be believed, then a system with two Intel Xeon quad-core microprocessors based on the new micro-architecture at 3.20GHz clock-speed will offer much higher floating point performance than currently available dual-processor server machines. While the results of a 2P machine featuring a pair of quad-core AMD Opteron at 2.50GHz reveal potential, its performance is much slower compared to a 2P Intel Xeon 5400-series-based machine (with 3.20GHz CPU clock speed and 1.60GHz processor system bus speed) in the crucial SPECfp_2006, according to Intel (see slide 18 of this presentation).

At present, quad-core AMD Opteron processor does not have any advantage over quad-core Intel Xeon processor when it comes to integer computations at the same clock-speed. Nevertheless, the new micro-architecture of AMD’s quad-core chips allows the central processing units (CPUs) to outperform Intel quad-core Xeon central processing units by 26% when it comes to floating point computations. However, performance comparison between the forthcoming chips may become much different.

AMD Opteron 2360 SE processor at 2.50GHz is currently not available, however, its specifications are clear from AMD’s documents concerning its SPECfp_rate2006 and SPECint_rate2006 performance released to public.

Meanwhile, according to documents seen by X-bit labs, there is no quad-core Intel Xeon 5400-series chip at 3.20GHz planned for release this year. The clock-speeds of the forthcoming Intel Xeon 5400-series processors with 12MB of cache will generally remain on the current level and are expected to be in the range of 3.0GHz. Besides, there will also be two models with 6MB of cache that will operate at 3.33GHz and 3.40GHz.

Neither AMD nor Intel commented on future processors for this news-story.