In the face of a torrent of new chips from bitter rival Intel, AMD has taken the wraps off of its upcoming quad-core Barcelona for the first time publicly, giving a few lucky journalists in Monterrey, CA a sneak peak at what a true 4×4 platform is capable of. The folks at [H]Enthusiast were on hand for the event, where the company displayed a dual-processor and single processor machine and “showed off both systems encoding a 1080p trailer of Spiderman 3 to an H.264 format.” The verdict? “On the dual quad-core Barcelona machine the encoding nearly ran real time. Extremely impressive.”

For more details on the event:
– see this post at [H]Enthusiast