Former Inquirer writer Fuad Abazovic released benchmarks of the upcoming AMD quad-core Barcelona. Abazovic believes his benchmarks are "an AMD exclusive" of a new processor he has in his possession.

Unfortunately, not only is this tale completely fabricated, but the perpetrators who architected the hoax came forward early this morning on Swedish enthusiast forum, SweClockers.com.

The poster "2good4you" details the process he used to convince Abazovic that his benchmarks were authentic -- which essentially entailed a single email with the image attached.  Abazovic then republished the benchmarks as his own, and not for the first time alludes "2good4you."

Rest assured, real Barcelona benchmarks will arrive shortly.  AMD typically releases two spins of silicon before retail samples, EVT followed by DVT.  As of May 2007, several EVT samples are floating around, though it's difficult to predict the actual retail performance of K10 via these engineering samples.  AMD still had serious bugs in its EVT samples before AM2 launched, and the only real change presented on that architecture was the DDR2 memory controller -- for Barcelona we're talking about a dramatically new design.

With Computex coming up in less than a month, it's fairly reasonable to expect a flood of authentic benchmarks to make waves just after or during the show.   And even then, don't be so quick to believe the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt until we start seeing DVT and Retail samples.

Update 05/15/2007: As of noon today, Abazovic removed the article without an official statement.  Abazovic has emailed DailyTech with the following response:

Next time please send me an email and ask me for an explanation will make you more processional

I still stand by this one
http://www.fudzilla.com/.....620&Itemid=35