In response to AMD's Barcelona benchmarks Intel demoed its V8 platform. Two quad core Xeons at 3GHz with 16GB RAM score an impressive 4933 pixels per second in POV-Ray. In comparison AMD's quad quad core Barcelona (16 cores total) score just over 4000 pixels per second. Even though AMD did not mention the clockspeed and said the final version will run faster AMD still uses 16 cores while Intel uses 8. Of course Barcelona is not yet a final product, Intel is not impressed though.
Besides that Intel also demoed a Penryn which outperformed the current top of the line quad cores by 40%, quite impressive.

AMD is claiming that its new quad-core Barcelona processors could outshine Intel's Xeon processors by as much as 50% in floating-point performance, as well as having a 20% advantage when it comes to integer performance. However, despite this claim, the actual benchmarks for the SPECcpu2006 test seem difficult to come across on AMD's website - despite AMD supposedly giving a link - so it's difficult to verify at present.

Luckily, it's much easier to find the results comparing AMD's new Opteron 2222 processor and Intel's 3.0GHz Xeon 5160. These show AMD enjoying greater performance by as much as 15% in some SPUCcpu2006 tests, which it credits to its Direct Connect Architecture and DDR2 memory. Obviously it would be a good idea to take these results with a pinch of salt considering they come directly from AMD, but Barcelona certainly looks promising. Read on for the complete press release.

Fuad has word that the upcoming K10 server processor codenamed Barcelona is 50 percent faster in specfp_rate2000 then Intel's quad core Kentsfield. As the CPU speed was not disclosed it will be near the stated 2.5GHz which applies for its fastest desktop counterpart, the Agena FX. The slowest Agena's will however start at 1.9GHz and will have the 95W TDP for sure.

Our last findings on how fast R600 cards perform in 3DMark06 caused a lot of buzz. Let's see how the following tidbit shapes up:
The VR-Zone has some numbers they couldn't keep for themselves regarding a Radeon X (sorry...), HD 2900 XT coupled with a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (quad core) processor. They say with the latest 8.361-RC4 drivers they got around 12K with that R600XT card which is faster 2000 points higher than the scores from FX57.net. They price of this card will be 399USD which would be quite a bargain.

Forum user sdscsv from the PCOnline forum has posted pictures of his 8600 GTS card, as well as some benchmarks:

The first major DirectX10 title from EA, Crysis, is a game I'm sure a lot of us are looking forward to. The folks over at Hardspell managed to get a pre-release copy of Crysis, on Windows Vista using drivers that aren't available to the public yet. These preliminary benchmarks certainly don't look too good. A system that we'd call overkill high-end simply choked on Crysis. The system was running a QX6700, 2 G80's, dual raptors in RAID 0, 4GB low latency RAM, and a PhysX card.

• At 1024x768, Crysis ran at 44 FPS average, with a mininum of 33 FPS and a maximum of 69 FPS.
• At 1280x1024, Crysis ran at 37 FPS average, with a minimum of 17.3 FPS, and a maximum of 52 FPS.
• At 2560x1600 Crysis ran at a whopping 1.7 FPS average, with a minimum of .2 FPS, and a maximum of around 5 FPS.

Again, neither Crysis or the official NVIDIA driver has been released, and games with the PhysX card enabled have noticeably lower FPS than the non-PhysX counter-part.