AMD (NYSE: AMD) will release its powerful new Barcelona chip today. The chip is a "quad core", meaning that it has four processor on one platform. The new product is aimed at high-end servers and PCs and is being shipped in products from Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA).

Larger rival Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has taken much of the server market away from Advanced Micro over the last year or so. Barcelona is a bid to get that back. Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64 told Reuters, "The stakes here are for AMD to staunch the erosion in its marketshare and to once again go on the offensive against Intel."

For Advanced Micro, it may be too late. The company has been left for stock market "road kill" by investors. Shares of the company were above $42 in early 2006. They now change hands below $13. The company took on a great deal of debt when it bought chip company ATI. Wall Street has been concerned that AMD will have trouble paying down that debt. The No.2 x86 processor company has also lost its top two sales executives in the last month.

The markets will know fairly soon if Barcelona is gaining share. Several research firms track chip sales in PCs and servers. Intel has already introduced its own "quad core" products.

If Barcelona does not do well, it is likely that the company will see major management changes and that ATI and other businesses may have to be sold off. Things are that dark for Advanced Micro.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

When my brother took a job at Intel's Folsom, Calif. office a year ago, the family mumbled -- the position was taking one of my parents' three grandchildren nearly a thousand miles away. But he was thrilled, as he'd be working on every engineer's dream: a super-chip. In the quest to get ever-more-powerful, Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC) has just announced successful production of a "mind-boggling" chip, one that can process 1 trillion calculations per second. Mind-boggling indeed: I can't even conceive of that speed and now understand why my brother had books on chaos theory by his bedside as a teen.

This is so fast, that every mention of it includes the phrases "revolutionize computing" and "lightning speed," and it makes me feel a tiny bit better that my son Everett can only play with his little cousin on holidays. The chip, which has a huge market in Wall Street's financial analyses (which could be done in seconds instead of the days they now take), physics, and gaming, will be ready for the market in about five years.

In which time software makers like Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will have to scramble to develop systems that can operate on so-called "multicore" chips. According to BusinessWeek, software which takes advantage of two-core chips hasn't even been developed as of yet -- four, eight, 80 (that's what Intel's chip can hold)? Now the developers' minds are a-boggling. I don't quite get it, but the new chip layers memory in three dimensions, allowing it to be both fast and energy-efficient.

It's proof that, not only will my children have fantastic video games in 2012, but my brother should keep his job. Guess we'll have to start springing for trips to California -- I have another niece on the way!