Improved Power Management

Split Plane Power

The Barcelona will be the first processor to support a split-plane power supply. Instead of forcing the processor to share the same power plane as the north bridge chip, motherboards that support split-plane power supply will be able to deliver separate power supplies to the processor and the north bridge.

This allows for better power management of the processor and the north bridge chip. Both chips can now adjust their power consumption according to their usage patterns. In fact, AMD says split plane motherboards can also be used to overclock the north bridge to reduce memory latency and improve its performance by 3-10%.

For current Opteron users though, there is no need to worry about split plane power. The Barcelona will support current unified plane motherboards just fine. You can upgrade to split plane motherboards as and when you feel it's the right time.

Power Comparison

Although AMD isn't forthcoming with review samples of the upcoming quad-core Opteron, they gave us a power comparison of dual and quad core processors from AMD and Intel. There's no mention of the actual processor models, just selected processors according to three performance levels. As such, you need to take the results with a pinch of salt, if not a spoonful.

AMD claims that their dual-core and quad-core processors offer 20-80W lower power consumption when compared to similar Intel processors. The largest difference was seen with the high-performance quad-core processor models. Again, the results have to be taken with a pinch of salt since we don't know what models they are comparing. Intel will probably refute this with a similar claim.