AMD: 6-Core Istanbul Available in June
AMD plans to ship the six-core Opteron in May to boost profitability. Intel says that its processors are still better.
AMD began its sixth anniversary of the Operton with the launch of two low-power Opteron EE chips, targeted towards cloud computing or other dense server environments. The company finished up the day with even better news: the official announcement of AMD’s six-core “Istanbul” processor, set for a May release.
For those of you thinking you’ve suddenly missed out on a few months of your life, don’t panic. Originally, the 45-nm Istanbul had been scheduled to ship later in the year, but speaking to financial analysts earlier this week, AMD’s president and chief exec, Dirk Meyer, said that the company decided to "pull in" the timetable. Yesterday afternoon AMD held a news conference to discuss its server roadmap and the company released additional details about Istanbul.
AMD claims the soon to be released processor will produce 30 percent more performance than the existing "Shanghai" quad-core processor at the same power requirements and said we can expect to see systems incorporating Istanbul in June. And just because every announcement made in the processor market these days seems to come with its own little piece of soap opera drama, the Register reports that upon hearing the announcement, Intel had this to say:
"As competitors fall behind in performance, you’ll see them throw more cores and more die size at their processors to keep up. This takes up valuable processor real estate and fab capacity. The key is not I/O, integrated memory controllers, or any one peripheral feature. The key is who has the better processor microarchitecture, and clearly that is Intel."
- Report: Intel SSD Price Cut on April 26
- Nvidia Releases OpenCL Driver
- IBM New Memory: Faster, Better, than SSDs
- Windows 7 Security Features Revealed
- Intel Cuts Prices of Core 2 Duo, Quad Chips
- Dept. of Defense to Announce Cybersecurity Command
- Time Warner Holding Back Super-fast Broadband?
- First Android Netbook Costs Just $100
- Duke Nukem Forever: Possibly Close to Completion?
- Find Illegal Torrents Using Google
- Report: MSI to Unveil Android Netbook in June
- Pirate Bay Judge Accused of Bias
- Apple: Netbooks Don't Deserve Mac Brand
- Nvidia CEO Denies VIA Investment Rumors
- Time Warner, Embarq Hopes to Kill Little ISP
- Opterons: 12-core in 2010, 16-core in 2011
- Windows 7 Build 7100 is RC, But Beware of Fakes
- Apple Beats Recession With Its Best Q2 Ever
Sour grapes!?
Last time I checked, 70% of the world's super-computers were based on AMD hardware. They're hardly behind, especially as regards GPU technology and cloud computing as well as 28nm development.
So did Core 2. AMD made better use of the silicon real estate, including their quad-cores.
They're crucial elements for servers and clusters.
There's more to a processor than that and you know it. There are things like compatibility, power envelopes (the 6 core AMD parts will use the same power envelope as the quad-cores), minimum downtime when replacing parts..unit price.
And talking about microarchitectures..who's currently got the best GPU hardware..Intel..nVidia..or AMD? Core 2 had faster micro-architecture..so why was it overlooked? For the same reason you wouldn't buy a car made from a Ferrari engine strapped to a pram..it's not a complete systems solution.
LEt it pass, give them the false sense of security, when aMd has 32 cores, and peopel start to program and make use of them, then youll see intel popin up with 32 cores as well, or WAIT will they stick to less cores?
