Intel plans to launch Xeons E5405 based on 45 nanometre Penryn generation of processors and according to current plans 2GHz version with four cores, will sell for $204 at launch.

This means that AMD won’t be able to price its Barcelona at much more than this price as side by side these two CPUs should have a very similar price.

We know that K10 and its server codename Barcelona are faster than Core 2 Quad generation in clock to clock comparison but Xeon E5405 is based on a new refreshed Quad core that has some secrets such as SSE4 and some other things.

If AMD wants to make much more it has to be significantly faster in clock to clock comparison than E5405 and we believe AMD has a chance to beat Yorkfield / Harpertown in Virtualization.