AMD Launches Six-Core Processor 'Istanbul'

AMD yesterday announced the availability of its first native six-core server processor with Direct Connect Architecture for two-, four-, and eight-socket servers. Six-Core AMD Opteron processors (code-named ‘Istanbul’) are expected to be available beginning this month from leading OEMs including Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems, along with support from motherboard and infrastructure partners. HE, SE and EE versions of the six-core AMD Opteron processor are planned for the second half of 2009.

Ramkumar Subramanian, vice president, sales and marketing, AMD India, said, “While the world is going through turbulent economic times, enterprises are mainly looking at platform compatibility and upgrade capacity. AMD has kept this as the fundamental thought behind this launch and has designed the product in such a way that it can leverage existing platform infrastructure.”

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‘Istanbul’ has been designed to fit into the same socket 1207 architecture as Shanghai (the company’s quad-core processor, which was launched last year). Thus, companies would be able to exploit more cores with same power and thermal levels. Six-core AMD Opteron processors leverage low-cost, power-efficient DDR-2 memory architecture, which can help lower system acquisition costs.

Product Features

Hyper-transport Technology Assist (HT Assist) will help to reduce processor latency and traffic. AMD Virtualisation (AMD-V) technology and the AMD-P suite of power management features are available across all performance and power bands. The AMD-V feature is mainly targeted towards the virtualisation trend, which enables to run more virtual machines per server. The AMP-P power saving feature addresses energy-efficiency related challenges. AMD Coolcore technology automatically turns off parts of the processor core when they are not in use offering reduced processor power consumption. The company claims that this new six-core AMD Opteron processor has up to 34 percent more performance-per-watt over the previous generation quad-core processors in the exact same platform.

“Based on close collaboration with our customers, we believe there is a clear value shift changing the economics of the server market,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. “The new six-core AMD Opteron processor meets the increasing need for a combination of low total cost of ownership, superior performance-per-watt and scalability.”

AMD’s six core processor announcement comes right after Intel’s announcement to start production of its eight-core Xeon processor ‘Nehalem-EX’ in the second half of 2009. The race to increase the number of cores in a single chip is getting fierce between both players. Subramanian said, “If Intel has made an announcement about an eight-core processor; then we are not sitting still, we will also be launching our 12-core processor in the market soon. But more importantly, they are talking about tomorrow while we are talking about today.”