AMD's Barcelona will enable datacentres to double capacity without upgrading power supplies or cooling systems, the company has said. It also includes hardware support to speed virtualisation, providing a boost to server consolidation.

Due to ship in August as the Quad-Core Opteron, Barcelona has been designed from the ground up for power efficiency, keeping the same power budget as AMD's dual-core chips. This makes it an easy upgrade for boosting performance, according to the firm.

"A large datacentre might upgrade from dual-core to quad, going from 8,000 to 16,000 cores total, without any change in power consumption or heat generated. With the competition, you would have to depopulate some servers because you would run out of power budget," said Felipe Payet, AMD manager for channel market development.

AMD said its Rapid Virtualisation Indexing will boost virtualisation through better hardware support. In particular, translation of virtual to physical memory addresses can now be done in hardware instead of software such as VMware.

"Early results show about a 40 percent performance improvement when using virtualisation in Barcelona," said Steve Demski, AMD Server and Workstation product manager.

In a recent report, analyst firm Gartner said it expected AMD's Barcelona chip to take a leadership position in four-way servers, as Intel does not yet have any product that can compete. However, the report said that this situation may change in the near future once Intel introduces technology such as its CSI interconnect that mirrors AMD's HyperTransport.

The first systems using Barcelona are expected in September, AMD said.