AMD Unleashes Eight- and 12-Core Opterons

Advanced Micro Devices today announced it has begun revenue shipments of the "Magny-Cours" line of Opteron 6100 server processors, with eight or 12 cores per massive package.

The news came courtesy of a blog post by John Fruehe, director of product marketing for server/workstation products at AMD (NYSE: AMD). "I wasn't really expecting to write this blog just yet, I was hoping to spring that news sometime in the near future, but the Internet's 'series of tubes' have been lit up and stole my thunder," he wrote.

Fruehe is referring to an eBay listing that offered four of the processors for sale for $7,000. With no motherboard to run them, the chips -- being sold by a central Missouri merchant -- were useless, and given that the processors had not even been officially announced, it might not be surprising that they received zero bids.

The Magny-Cours design essentially takes two of the six-core "Istanbul" generation of Opteron processors and connects them with a HyperTransport interface in one package. With eight to 12 cores in one chip package, it's a very large die, rectangular in shape instead of the usual square chip.

The eight-core Magny-Cours uses the same principle as the triple-core Phenom: AMD took a 12-core Magny-Cours and shut four of the cores off in the package. AMD has not said what the specs are on the chip, but it is believed the Opteron 6000 series processors will have a thermal draw of between 85 and 140 watts, comparable to the older Opteron servers, and run at clock speeds between 1.7GHz and 2.4GHz.

They all use a new chip socket called Socket G34, which will work with a future 8-core/12-core processor called "Interlagos." In the all-important speeds-and-feeds competition, AMD has once again surpassed rival Intel, which has three memory channels per chip with Nehalem.

AMD achieved this design by putting two of the six-core Istanbul processors on a single chip and connecting the two in what is known as a multi-chip module (MCM). Intel did something similar with its first quad-core Xeons in 2007, and AMD ridiculed Intel for it something fierce, saying the designs were not true quad-core but rather two dual-core CPUs badly wired together.

The smaller chipmaker quieted down when its native quad-core design, Barcelona, ended up shipping a year late. Intel, meanwhile, has gone on to ship native quad-core designs with the Nehalem Xeon 5500 series.

Semiconductor analyst Nathan Brookwood said a comparison between the Magny-Cours and the pre-Nehalem Xeon isn't fair, however. The old Xeon's two chips, each with two cores, had to contend with the bottleneck that was the frontside bus, since they could not communicate directly: Each chip had to send data out, through the FSB, and into the other.

AMD, on the other hand, uses a HyperTransport link to directly connect the two packages, which is much faster than the FSB, Brookwood said. He also said each chip has a pair of memory controllers, giving the Magny-Cours chips four memory controllers to Intel's three.

"So they have two chips in the package but [compared to AMD's older Opterons] have twice the number of memory controllers and twice as much memory bandwidth, which is why this chip provides better scaling of performance than otherwise would be the case," Brookwood, a research fellow with Insight 64, told InternetNews.com.

He said a single 12-core processor as a result should offer performance close to two six-core Istanbul processors, though a reduction in clock speed to keep the heat down means it's unlikely to be a true 100 percent scaling.

Andy Patrizio is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.