So Intel's response to the 3.0 GHz dual-core Opteron's floating point performance is to point out the quad-core Clovertown beats the dual-core Opteron by 9%?

Barcelona will be capable of four floating point operations per cycle, and expects to get about 50% better FP performance per core at the same clock rate as current Opterons. That suggests Barcelona will more than double Clovertown's SPECfp_rate performance, while likely equaling or slightly exceeding Clovertown's SPECint_rate performance.

I can see why Intel is defensive. They basically have a minimally engineered, quad-core "marchitecture". When faced with the lemon of the Front Side Bus, they made Clovertown lemonade.

I still think most of Intel's recent sales are of dual-core Woodcrest parts (and Woodcrest is a very good chip, mind you), but Intel chose to make the thought leadership debate about quad-core, and that is about to come back and bite them.

In HPC clusters at least, Barcelona will trump Clovertown.

What would really be interesting is if AMD "Clovertowned" Barcelona into an 8-core/die module.

AMD makes superior products and they have for over 10 years now. Intel knows this, you can see it in their marketing, you can see it in their strategy.

Just like others that try to pimp out weak products to the masses, they use FUD when faced with true competition.

Its very entertaining...