Those of us who told the world plus dog about the Barcelona chip launch in June and even found a sales video last a while back, did not get a copy so we were very excited to hear about it from outfits who broke embargos to tell you the news "first".

Like I said, we have never heard of this 'Barcelona' gizmo before, but according to CNET, it will pull AMD's nadgers from the fire after CEO Hector Ruiz will formally unveil the quad-core Opteron chip during an event in San Francisco Monday evening.

If CNET is to be believed we got the event launch all wrong and are sending our top hack, Paul Hales to AMD's Barcelona launch in Spain this morning. Still he has not had a holiday since last week.

Apparently, Barcelona will be AMD's first chip with four processing cores, which is four small brains doing the work of one big one, in case you didn't know.

AMD said says that Barcelona is "the world's most advanced x86 processor ever designed" and is the "first native x86 quad-core microprocessor".

The chip can "deliver breakthrough capabilities to customers in a time of dramatically escalating performance-per-watt emphasis".

Really. So it goes. µ