AMD demos Barcelona, claims 42% floating-point edge vs. Xeon
 

At a press event today, AMD/ATI talked up their forthcoming quad-core Barcelona processor. The company claims that the next-generation processor, due out in the second half of 2007, bests the quad-core Xeon 5355 by 42 percent in SPECfp_rate. SPECfp_rate is a throughput benchmark used to test multiprocessor systems, and the fact that Barcelona beat the top end of Intel's Xeon 5000 sequence by such a large margin bodes well for the platform.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070301-8958.html