By Nebojsa Novakovic
AMD CELEBRATED its Opteron chip’s sixth birthday in a fitting way by accelerating the six-core Istanbul release to June, and by announcing the 12-core total of two Istanbul dies in one Magny-Cours package to come out half a year later.
At the same time, Intel’s single die eight-core, 16-thread Beckton Nehalem EX should be out a little before Magny-Cours, followed by native 32nm six-core Westmere DP chips early next year.
How well will they stand up against each other? Well, core for core and clock for clock, Istanbul will still be behind Nehalem in most cases, whether you look at CPU, cache or memory bound benchmarks. Nehalem only seems to be beaten clock for clock by the older Penryn in some tight loops and cryptography jobs, for now.
1 response so far ↓
1 Danieljohnson // May 6, 2009 at 4:52 am
With Intel’s six core Nehalem architecture fast capturing the market, it was necessary for AMD to come up with something quickly. And finally came up with the release of Istanbul, the Opteron series from AMD features six cores and a faster HyperTransport interconnect
So what does AMD have going for it right now with Istanbul:
Istanbul provides the best value for customers who already own a Shanghai or Barcelona based server. In-socket replacement, very low downtime for upgrades and better performance with just a change of CPU.
DDR2 memory – DDR2 memory is now priced very competitively against DDR3. This brings down the overall cost of the system. Istanbul will use DDR2 instead of the more costly DDR3 memory.