AMD scored a key victory in processors today by launching the Opteron 6000 series. The members of the Magny-Cours family are the first using the x86 architecture to ship with either eight or 12 cores and can handle many more tasks at once than previous processors. A 12-core example can be twice as fast as the previous six-core Opteron and fend off Intel's six-core Xeon 5600.
AMD's Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation John Fruehe admitted today that 12-core Opteron chips have already begun shipping, as reported last week. What the company is calling its most advanced x86 processor, codenamed Magny-Cours, is officially named the Opteron 6100 Series and production has started weeks ago at a factory in Germany. Fruehe goes on to say that OEM partners began receiving production chips in February, though exactly who received the chips is not yet being publicly revealed.
A Missouri-based server distributor, Oakville Mehlville Computers, is allegedly selling AMD's 12-core Opteron CPUs ahead of the formal launch, according to the company's eBay auction. The components, known by the monicker Magny-Cours, were originally expected to ship sometime in the first quarter of this year, although AMD has yet to publicly announce the exact date.
AMD in its annual analyst event provided details of some of its future processors and platforms. The highlight for the semiconductor firm is "Bulldozer," a major revision for both desktops and notebooks that should be much more efficient at multithreaded codethan existing designs. It will be particularly optimized for pairing with graphics chipsets and will be supplemented by "Bobcat," a variant of Bulldozer tailored to ultraportables.
AMD started the week today with a new whole platform for Opterons targeted at servers and the very high end of the computer market. Previously nicknamed Fiorano, the six-core Opteron with AMD chipset takes the company's existing server and workstation chips but adds a new chipset, the S5650, designed to scale for very heavy workloads. The technology now supports virtualization in hardware down to the very basic I/O interfaces and also brings the much faster PCI Express 2.0 interface and AMD's latest HyperTransport point-to-point interface between the processor and the rest of the system.
