AMD announced today that they will be shipping both standard power and low power native quad-core processors in August. These are the CPUs codenamed Barcelona and this launch of two versions is the first time AMD has had standard and low power versions available at initial launch.

While the CPUs themselves will be shipping in August 2007, AMD expects systems using the processors to begin shipping form their partners in September 07. The Barcelona CPU is the first CPU to integrate four cores onto one die of silicon.

Parts at launch will have frequencies of up to 2.0GHz and higher frequency processors are expected to degut in Q4 2007. Performance improvements along the lines of 70% in certain database applications and 40% on floating point operations are expected. The CPUs are said to be backwards compatible with existing Opteron parts. I can’t wait to see what the high performance series aimed at consumers is like. Via AMD