"Because they are under NDA, he cannot reveal the actual results, but he gave us some interesting indications of how the Barcelona will eventually fare against an equivalent Intel processor.

— 20-30% better performance overall
— 170% better performance in some benchmarks

More importantly, he says, the Quad-Core Opteron (Barcelona) will offer 45-85% better performance than current dual-core Opteron processors at the same power consumption and thermal dissipation. Intel quad-core processors, on the other hand, only offer 30-35% better performance (11% in floating point) than their dual-core processors with a 23-25% increase in power consumption and thermal dissipation."

The next big step will be when one or more major operators puts all these parts together to realize the ninefold or greater savings that we outlined. In fact, I now think we can do even better, because both the IT and the support equipment are proving to be more efficient than we thought possible.