AMD Unveils Pricing, Performance for Opteron 6000 Series

“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.”

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