Most likely AMD did not expect the CPUs to go on sale before the launch later in Q1, but at the launch event AMD will present a whole bunch of new Opteron processors with both eight and twelve cores.
The information that surfaced back in December 2009 turned out to be pretty precise as we expect three “mainstream” models of the Opteron 6000 series with clock frequencies between 1.9GHz and 2.2GHz. There will also be new flavors of HE and SE where the clocks will be between 1.70GHz and 2.3GHz, either eight or twelve cores.
Two of AMD’s hexa-core Istanbul dies are the base of Magny-Cours
The power consumption will be relatively high with so many cores. AMD is expected to present versions in the 95W, 115W and 140W TDP envelopes depending on cores and frequency.
