At the risk of giving its not yet released consumer CPU, the Phenom II X6, an inferiority complex of sorts, AMD today launched its new Opteron 6000-series of CPUs. Being called Magny-Cours, these brutes of massive processing power packs two Istanbul cores, offering a total of 12 physical cores in one package on AMD’s new socket G34 platform. That’s twice the amount of cores that Intel’s new Xeon 5600 family can offer.
The Opteron 6100-series of processors of today offers some 10 different models, where half of them features 12 cores and the other half will have to do with 8. Clock frequencies vary from 1.8 to 2.4GHz with the flagship, Opteron 6176 SE, with 12 cores working at 2.3GHz and 12MB of L3 cache. Still, the maximum power consumption is supposed to be an impressively low 105W.
The CPU’s of the new Opteron 6100-family can be used in systems with two or four CPU’s and AMD says that the performance to price ratio will be very hard to beat.
“The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform signals a new era of server value, significantly disrupts today’s server economics and provides the performance-per-watt, value and consistency customers demand for their real-world data center workloads.”
Some news in the already well-tested architecture is a more efficient DDR3 memory controller, Direct Connect 2.0 as well as efficient energy-saving functions with the C1E power state.
AMD Opteron 6000-series supports massive amounts of DDR3-1333 RAM.
Just like the previous Opteron-generation, Magny-Cours is manufactured using 45nm technology and is used together with chipsets from the 5600-series where we find HyperTransport 3.0 support as well as PCI Express 2.0.
Performance in terms of floating-point calculations are up to 119% higher that the previous generation, even though the first tests shows us that this isn’t enough for all applications.
Compared to Intels hexacore Xeon 5600-series of CPUs, the Opteron 6100-series does well. However, as a workstation or when working with OLTP and ERP databases the Xeon is a better choice, even though it does have fewer cores. But AMD seems to be on the right way with its server processors, showing good performance in a lot of heavy areas and with really competitive prices as well.
Prices and more information can be found at AMD’s webpage.
Two Magny-Cours systems shown by SuperMicro during CeBIT 2010
