AMD’s Istanbul Opteron CPUs Hit Markets

 

AMD have moved up the launch of their high-end 6-core Istanbul x86 server processors and the chips are likely to hit the market within the next few days. The launch, which is months earlier than originally expected, is seen as a response to Intel’s previewing their 8-core Nehalem EX Server CPUs last week.

 

Aimed at server markets, the Istanbul Opteron processor boasts of 30% better performance per watt. It features four or more sockets and comes, provides up to 50% better performance and yet is priced at par with its predecessors. The new processors also integrate new technologies including HT Assist; servers based on this new-age technology are expected to do well in high performance computing.

 

Discussing the Istanbul processors in a blog post, AMD’s John Fruehe wrote, “[HT Assist] can give you much better throughput over the HyperTransport technology connections by reducing the amount of traffic generated by the processors in seeking the shortest path to data that they need.”

 

With the processors expected to reach OEMs within the coming week, we can expect manufacturers to show-case their servers based on the Istanbul processors soon. The early launch should also give AMD a major edge over Intel as the latter’s Nehalem EX CPUs are not expected to become available for several months.

 

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