Server sales may have been slumping of late, but that hasn’t stopped the chip makers from revving up their plans for a new crop of high-speed processors. The latest comes from AMD, which has disclosed the speeds and feeds of its new “Magny Cours” line of Opteron processors, which it says bests Intel’s latest Xeon’s by measure of performance-per-watt.
Hardware Central takes a look at AMD’s new Opteron 6000 series of processors, which the company sees as its in to gain back some much-needed market share from Intel.
AMD has formally released the “Magny-Cours” line of eight- and 12-core Opteron server processors, disclosing the speeds and feeds and promising performance-per-watt that beats Intel’s newest Xeon.
It’s a competitive time in the server market, even as server sales have been fairly anemic. With one-third of servers deployed still using old, single-core processors, the market may be on the cusp of a major upgrade push. Not surprisingly, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) have responded by coming out with faster and more powerful multi-core processors to support virtualization and high-performance computing.
The Opteron 6000 series, the formal name for Magny-Cours, puts two six-core “Istanbul” cores on one die and connects them with a high-speed HyperTransport connection. The eight-core design has four deactivated cores, just as AMD does when turning quad- into triple-core Phenom processors.