A year and a bit of change ago when Core2Duo first came out there were ZILLIONS of comparison head to head articles. There were C2D ES samples everywhere, everything ffrom the local Highsheet newspater up to the NY Times had a comparison article...

But now with Barcelona versus Woodcrest, it's WFT...?

Where are the head to heads?

Has the press fallen asleep?

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3091

I think too few reviewers got the chips. And then, IIRC, Anands setup stopped working shortly after they did their preview/review. I too expected to be inundated with reviews and comparisons. I'm sure the reviewers would have if they could.

Pretty much a worthless review as the 2350 is market at the Intel 2S dominance. Lets see the 8350 against the E7320 and E7330 were AMD owns the market. Intels mem bandwidth goes from 21GB's down to 8.5GB's on the 4S.

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So much for AMD's plans to "launch with a product..." http://www.infoworld.com/article/0 [...] nch_1.html

Dont forget that the C2D is made for the mainstream market, Barcelona is built for the server market, atleast for now. it does kinda make it more difficult to review and compare a product when its market is limited to servers.

And also when the product is being paperlaunched.

Anand may have sneaked (or "snuck" if you prefer) out his article while other sites are in a battle with AMD over releasing "pro-AMD" articles vs the truth. Consiparcy theory, sure, but based on nuggets of truth.

Or it could simply be that they don't have enough functional chips to go around. Yes, it's an ES, but I would have expected AMD to stress test an ES to death before giving it out to a reviewer site. Anand wasn't (as far as we know) trying to go for an extreme overclock - seemed like a reasonable expectation. Maybe there are just problems with functionality and yields. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the correct one.

Heck, Penryn could probably "launch" now just as effectively as Barcelona "launched" (am I the only one who thinks product launch should not be a subjective phrase?).

THIS JUST IN:

AMD has issued an AMBER ALERT for Barcelona based Opterons!

I'm calling BS on the Amber Alert... my cell phone didn't alert me!!! I'm sure Barcie is doing just fine. Probably just down at a friend's house.

I think there are a couple military terms for it, MIA, or AWOL. Either way, I have yet to see a Barcelona advertised or any real reviews of it with comparitive benches. PAPER LAUNCH!!!

Ok, in my way of thinking a launch is real when I see it advertised on Newegg, Tiger, etc, or at least see machines advertised for sale by Dell, etc. Haven't seen that, so as far as I feel, there is no Barcelona yet. Just a bunch of paper.