We’re hearing this in several places, but The Register’s Timothy Prickett Morgan has an overview of AMD’s schedule acceleration on the new Opterons
AMD is picking up the pace for its six-core, Istanbul family of Opteron processors, saying it will ship the chips to paying customers in May with server OEM partners shipping in June.
That brings the Istanbul chips ahead by several months and gives AMD a chance to leapfrog Intel in the two-socket server space, where Intel has just launched its quad-core Nehalem EP Xeon 5500s. It will also provide parity or better with Intel’s six-core Dunnington Xeon 7400s for four-socket servers.
But, this acceleration is not without risk
And because of the confidence that AMD has after it rejiggered its design and testing processes in the wake of the Barcelona bug, the company took Istanbul from tape out to production on one take, which Pat Patla, general manager of the server and workstation chip business at AMD, said was the first time the company had done that. This could be risky. We’ll know about July or so.
And then there’s Magny-Cours (anyone know how to pronounce that?)
Moving ahead Istanbul means that AMD can also move ahead its high-end Magny-Cours twelve-shooter, which is two Istanbuls put in the same package, side-by-side, with four HT3 links coming out of the chip package.
Mag-Nee Cores
FJW – thanks.
from http://www.betanews.com/article/The-plan-to-get-AMD-Opteron-back-in-sync/1240525554
called “Magny-Cours” but pronounced “many-core.”
Seems obvious in retrospect.
With Intel’s six core Nehalem architecture fast capturing the market, it was necessary for AMD to come up with something quickly. And finally came up with the release of Istanbul, the Opteron series from AMD features six cores and a faster HyperTransport interconnect
So what does AMD have going for it right now with Istanbul:
Istanbul provides the best value for customers who already own a Shanghai or Barcelona based server. In-socket replacement, very low downtime for upgrades and better performance with just a change of CPU.
DDR2 memory – DDR2 memory is now priced very competitively against DDR3. This brings down the overall cost of the system. Istanbul will use DDR2 instead of the more costly DDR3 memory.