AMD heads for ‘Istanbul’ with six cores

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AMD has announced that it will deliver a six-core Opteron processor in June this year.

The company said that the processor is codenamed ‘Istanbul’ and will offer 30 per cent more performance within the same power envelope as the current quad-core parts.

The company said that the chip will be delivered to market months ahead of schedule. In a blog post, John Fruehe, AMD’s Director of Business Development for Server and Workstation products said that the reason for this is that the new six-core chip is based on the, “highly successful 'Shanghai' design. With a highly leveraged core design and a very well-behaved 45nm process, making the leap from 4-core to 6-core was a snap..."

“If you do a great job on the design, and you nail it the first time, you can shave months, or quarters, off of the project schedule. Our current schedules are a testament to the abilities of our engineering teams around the world.”

As with most new processor launches these days, AMD said that Istanbul will be well suited to mutli-threaded environments such as virtualisation, and as Fruehe put it, this sort of use, "will be able to eat up those extra cores with a smile on their face. Greater levels of parallelism can help more work get done simultaneously for greater efficiency – and we expect it to all be possible within the same power and thermal levels that you see today with “Shanghai”".

AMD also announced its Direct Connect architecture, which will enable systems with 12 cores. We can also expect 8-12 core processors to arrive in 2010, as the Opteron 6000 series for 2P and 4P servers, while the Opteron 4000 series is planned for 2010 for 1P and 2P systems with four- and six-core processors.

Also revealed were is 32nm process technology plans, with 12-16 core processors in the pipeline. Codenamed, “Bulldozer”, the chips are scheduled for 2011 and will be supported on the “Maranello” platform. A 6-core 32nm chip, called ‘Valencia” weill accompany it, and will run in the “San Marino” platform.

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