AMD was on its toes last week demonstrating its upcoming ‘Istanbul’ processor to a select audience. Considering the demos held last week, AMD should be able to meet the release schedule for ‘Istanbul’ as planned earlier. This new 6-core version of the AMD Opteron processor is scheduled to be available in the second half of this year.
“It is everything we had hoped for – and more,” writes John Fruehe, director of business development for server/workstation products at AMD, in the company blog.
The blog says, “As a city, Istanbul is the only city that sits on two continents, Asia and Europe. As a processor, Istanbul also bridges two worlds, the socket 1207 that has been such a strong platform in the past, and a 6-core Direct Connect architecture, with 12, 24 or 48 cores per server for the future.”
Despite putting more cores in the processor, AMD has managed to keep Istanbul in the same power and thermal ranges as its existing ‘Shanghai’ processors.
“End users will be able to quickly qualify and deploy these servers because the overall platform is the same as what they are using. In today’s challenging economic times, that’s music to the ears of IT departments both near, and as far away as Turkey,” concludes Fruehe.