AMD's K7 to "Barcelona" quad-core

AMD is taking its powerful, flexible, and extensible K7 processor to new heights with K8, the "Barcelona" quad-core . According to one author, "the "tweaks" made to Barcelona would place the advances between Opteron and Barcelona of the same approximate order as that of a Pentium M to a Core 2. And as we all know, that's a significant bump in performance, power savings, and overall goodness." Some of the improvements you can expect to see: the doubling of SSE operations from 64-bits to 128-bits, shared L3, and an anticipated 95 watt envelope when it is released mid 2007.