First 16-Core Opteron Chips Arrive From AMD

angry tapir writes "After a brief delay and more than a year of chatter, Advanced Micro Devices has announced the availability of its first 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number of cores available on x86 chips today. The new Opteron 6200 chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25 per cent to 30 per cent faster than their predecessors, the 12-core Opteron 6100 chips, according to AMD."

Re:Poor performance

[the linux geek]

Servers need single-thread too; think stuff like big database writes, joins, ERP, and CRM. Think outside the embarrassingly-parallel web-serving box.

If multithreaded performance was all that matters, the Sun Niagara chips would have done a lot better than they did.

Re:Poor performance

[DarkOx]

Umm, Joins can be done in parallel, in lots and lots of cases. ERP and CRP are applications that ought to see big improvements form more cores, if you have more than a few users anyway. It also simplifies things, you don't have to figure out how to architect the thing to run across 10 hosts anymore, good multi-core systems deliver there performance these apps need if you can get the disk IO solved. A good SAN with mutlipath support and multiple HBAs can get there.

Niagara failed because each individual core was too slow, a comparable cost Intel CPU could do in serial with one core two jobs, in less time than Niagara could do one job with on core. The question is here for most paralleled work loads like a database where all cores will be used are AMDs 16 core chips at least 62% the speed of Intel's 10 core chips on core vs. core basis? If true other things being equal for *some* work loads these Opterons will be better.

 

Re:Only 16?

[afidel]

No, there are 16 integer pipelines with one scheduler and 4 logic units each, 16 128bit floating point units that can also be combined into 8 256bit units, and 8 fetch/decode units. This is not a MCU, it's one chip with the above mentioned components. Whether it's 16 cores or 8 or 4 modules is kind of academic unless you are trying to optimize a scheduler for it in which case the label's still don't matter, only the actual implementation and achievable performance matter.