The enhanced POWERNOW technology gives The upcoming Barcelona chip is AMD’s first Quad-core version of its Opteron line of products marketed for server and workstation applications. This chip is built with 65nm on SOI (Silicon on Insulator) technology .The native Quad –core technology as touted by AMD places all four cores on a die as against its rival Intel’s MCM  (multichip module) technology which means that four cores with separate dies are fused together to make the chip.

Despite having lost the lead in launching its flagship quad-core product, AMD claims to have many innovations under its belt that give it the competitive edge. The new 10h architecture with its 128-bit floating point, 32-bit instruction and the new three stage cache architecture of the cores pack high computing power with faster speeds and increased memory space. Such other features facilitate high performance applications and improved virtualization[1] technologies.

the flexibility of individual core frequencies with maximized performance at reduced voltages within a thermal envelope of 95 W.

The entire strengths put together make Barcelona chip a good bargain outweighing the disadvantage of its lower clock rates.

[1] The technology where one machine behaves like many virtual machines by running multiple operating systems.