Intel went hexa-core earlier this year by packing three dual-core Penryn dies together, a processor dubbed Dunnington. AMD has to have something similar to keep up on the server market, but much like Barcelona, the coming Istanbul core is a native one. It’s a derivate of the 45nm Shanghai core, but has six cores in the same die, instead of four. Luckily for us, native is not a keyword for AMD anymore. Maybe it realized that it didn’t gain anything from shouting “native” out loud over and over, when no one really cared about the internal design, but only the actual performance and how much power it drained from the outlet.
We’re simply saying that AMD will go multi-die in the future. It will pack both two Shanghai dies together to make an octo-core, but also two Istanbul dies to make a dodeca-core CPU. That’s twelve physical and highly complex x86 cores in the same processor.
This is where HyperTransport 3.0 will get a chance to really shine too. All core-to-core communication will go through HT interconnects. The cores will also be able to emulate a quad-channel memory controller, certainly a kick in the teeth for Intel and its tri-channel controller inside Nehalem.
AMD will start 45nmm production in late Summer, but those will be single-die Shanghai processors, Istanbul is not expected until first half of 2009, which means that production will most likely not start until a couple of months later.
