AMD's first six-core chip on track

Advanced Micro Devices will announce Wednesday that its first six-core processor in on track to launch later this year.

AMD's "Istanbul" processor will be targeted at server computers. With the release, AMD will be playing catch up to Intel, which began offering its six-core "Dunnington" processor for servers last fall. Intel's first Nehalem-architecture server processor is also due soon, which, on a per-core basis, is expected to offer better performance than Dunnington.

"The silicon is healthy and we're targeting a launch in 2H09," AMD spokesperson Jake Whitman said Tuesday.

"The new 6-core version of the AMD Opteron processor is...everything we had hoped for--and more," John Fruehe, director of business development for server/workstation products at AMD, wrote in a blog.

The "socket 1207" platform and six-core Direct Connect architecture will allow servers with 12, 24 or 48 cores per server in the future, Fruehe said.

"Despite putting more cores in the processor, we managed to keep it in the same power and thermal ranges as our existing 'Shanghai' processors," he writes.

Recent AMD demonstrations of the technology featured "a live, seamless upgrade" of a system based on 45-nanometer quad-core Opteron processors to Istanbul processors. Istanbul is socket- and thermal-compatible with currently shipping AMD Opteron processor-based systems.

[slickuser]

core i7 will kill it!

[patch991]

Core i7 will do all this by how much and at what cost?

[Seaspray0]

And just how much software is out there to use all those processors?

[NewsReader_]

You are not thinking "virtually" <br /> <br />1 core for the OS, 5 cores for 5 VMs <br /> <br />much less than 6 separate computers

[jtara]

There's plenty of software out there to use all those processors. Sidestepping the usual (and erroneous) argument that "not much software is written to take advantage of multiple cores" (MOST software IS, and has been for years), these chips are intended for use in SERVERS. SERVERS typically actively run multiple processes at the same time, performing multiple simultaneous tasks for multiple clients. Modern server OSs are all able to effectively use multiple cores, and, indeed, absent multiple-core CPU chips, they've long incorporated multiple single-core chips. In fact, you can bet than many servers based on these chips will contain not one, but several of thise 6-core chips.

[Seaspray0]

@ Newsreader. Nope, I wasn't thinking virtually.

[jake-amd]

Check out videos of Istanbul demos here: http://links.amd.com/IstanbulUpgrade &#38; <br />http://links.amd.com/IstanbulDemo<br /><br />Also, images of the demos can be seen here: http://links.amd.com/Images

[gerrrg]

This reminds me of GM's Volt.<br /><br />You know it's coming, you generally know when it's coming, and they keep talking about it and telling you about it.<br /><br />To no end does the publicity machine ever stop.

[antitrustel]

Congrats on Istanbul, it sounds great (which means Intel and their fanboys will dish any garbage to distract the press and interested parties, plus the usual lawsuit against Nvidia or other company).<br /><br />Speaking of timeframes, isn't it time for the Intel Itanic to hit the dock or did it hit an X86-64 iceberg?

[ducttape36]

itanium has definitely sunk, intel is moving on i hope. and the only reason amd's processors havent hit an iceburg is that they overheat so much they melt every one they come near.

[pithenumber]

not really, Itanic hit the AMD64 and started sinking iceberg before the IA64 iceberg ever came

[antitrustel]

Congrats on Istanbul, it sounds great (which means Intel and their fanboys will dish any garbage to distract the press and interested parties, plus the usual lawsuit against Nvidia or other company).<br /><br />Speaking of timeframes, isn't it time for the Intel Itanic to hit the dock or did it hit an X86-64 iceberg?

[solu1978]

Good to see some competition :)

[scdecade]

Exactly! Thank you. Lordy, people have become such hair trigger bashers. Opteron pushed Intel to improve and the whole industry got a boost as a result. The more AMD and Intel go at it the better as far as I'm concerned.

[The_happy_switcher]

You'll need all those cores to run that Windows bloatware.

[pithenumber]

and you only need 2 cores<br />1 for Mac OS and 1 for iTunes or Safari since you do nothing else

[bzukiwski2]

This processor would be fantastic in a OS that did pervasive multi tasking such as BEOS. If microsoft would adopt such technology it would actualy take the responsibility away from the developers to program their software for multiple processors. The reason being that the core of the operating system will take any thread and break into many pieces and feed it to however many processors you may have.