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February 23, 2010

AMD 12-core chips on schedule

Filed under: News — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 10:31 am

I came across this article a few days ago on Xbitlabs and was surprised it didn’t seem to get replicated elsewhere. I found while playing with a stock tracking tool on my PDA (was looking at news regarding AMD). I’m not an investor but I find the markets interesting and entertaining at times.

Anyways it mentioned some good news from my perspective that is the 12-core Opterons (rather call them that then their code name because the code names quickly become confusing, I used to stay on top of all the CPU specs back in the Socket 7 days) are on track to ship this quarter. I was previously under the impression I guess incorrectly that they would ship by the end of next quarter. And it was Intel’s 8-core chips that would ship this quarter.

From the article

AMD Opteron “Magny-Cours” processor will be the first chip for the AMD G34 “Maranello” platform designed for Opteron processors 6000-series with up to 16 cores, quad-channel memory interface, 2 or 4 sockets, up to 12 memory modules per socket and some server and enterprise-specific functionality. Magny-Cours microprocessors feature two six-core or quad-core dies on one piece of substrate.

I read another article recently on The Register which mentioned AMD’s plans to take the chip to 16-cores in 2011.  I’ve been eagerly waiting for the 12-core chips for some time now mainly for virtualization, having the extra cores gives more CPU scheduler options when scheduling multi vCPU virtual machines. And it further increases the value of dual socket systems, allowing 24 real cores in a dual socket configuration that to me is just astonishing. And having the ability to have 24 memory sockets on a dual socket system is also pretty amazing. I have my doubts that anyone can fit 24 memory modules on a single half height blade but who knows. Right now to my knowledge HP has the densest half height blade as far as memory is concerned with 18 DIMMs for a Xeon 5500-based system and 16 DIMMs for an 6-core Opteron-based system. IBM recently announced a new more dense blade with 18 slots but it appears it is full height, so doesn’t really qualify. I think a dual socket full height blade is a waste of space. Some Sun blades have good densities as well though I’m not well versed in their technology.

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