AMD's Six-Core Istanbul Opterons 123
EconolineCrush writes "AMD's latest 'Istanbul' Opterons add two cores per socket, for a grand total of six. Despite the extra cores, these new chips reside within the same power envelope as existing quad-core Opterons, and they're drop-in compatible with current systems. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the new chips, comparing their performance and power efficiency with that of Intel's Nehalem-based Xeons. Istanbul fares surprisingly well, particularly when one considers its performance-power ratio with highly parallelized workloads."
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Harnessing muli-cpu machines with these installed is going to be.... Interesting.
No more interesting than existing many-core machines.
Seriously, having a couple dozen or more cores is nothing new.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll be finally able to run Crysis at a decent framerate.
Just in time to be behind the curve for Crysis 2!
Re:Scary Quote from the Article (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm in the silicon business. Not CPU, but still silicon.
It sounds as if AMD budgeted time for another pass at the design, and turned out not to need it. The amount of time they pulled out of the schedule looks more like a silicon pass than short-cutting testing and validation. Adding that extra pass, and making sure it was scheduled is probably a result of having been so badly burned last time, but that's good. You can always be a hero by doing better than plan.