San Francisco – In a bid to regain ground lost to its major rival Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has brought out its next-generation microchip, codenamed Barcelona today.

The top customers of AMD, such as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., and Sun Microsystems Inc. are already shipping computer systems using the AMD Barcelona chip. The chipmaker has already booked revenue from the new semiconductor.

Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said, “The stakes here are for AMD to staunch the erosion in its marketshare and to once again go on the offensive against Intel; That's the biggest thing."

Brookwood told that Intel recently launched its own high-end server processors, but those were only speeded-up versions, adding that Intel's own chips -- codenamed Nehala -- using a similar design to AMD's will not be available until a year from now.

The Opteron chip is up to 70 percent faster than its previous chips while using the same amount of power. Also, the chip is aimed at the market for servers, where AMD has in the past few years fared well against Intel.