IDG News Service - After a brief delay and more than a year of chatter, Advanced Micro Devices on Monday announced the availability of its first 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number of cores available on x86 chips today.
The new Opteron 6200 chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25% to 30% faster than their predecessors, the 12-core Opteron 6100 chips, said John Fruehe, director of product marketing at AMD.
The chips are shipping now and will be available in servers from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cray and Acer in the coming weeks, Fruehe said. The processors are based on AMD's new chip design called Bulldozer, which provides bandwidth and performance improvements while saving on power.
The chip shipments were delayed by a few weeks, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. The delay came as AMD tries to reverse its sagging fortunes in the server market after losing ground over the past year to Intel. AMD's worldwide server market share was only 5.5% during the second quarter this year, while Intel held a 94.5% share, according to IDC. AMD has also been dealing with customer complaints about the company not meeting product road maps.
The five 6200 chips -- 6262 HE, 6272, 6274, 6276 and 6282 SE -- run at clock speeds between 1.6GHz and 2.6GHz, and are priced between $523 and $1,019. The chips draw between 85 watts and 140 watts of power and will plug into existing server sockets to replace older 12-core chips.
"The 6200 is targeted at really scalable applications, things that have a lot of threads," such as databases, cloud and high-performance computing, Fruehe said.
The processors are for heavily threaded and virtualized server environments, Fruehe said. Linux and Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 operating systems are tuned to take advantage of 16 cores, and more instances of virtual machines can be created to handle transactions, Fruehe said.
The Bulldozer architecture mixes the CPU with integer units and a shared floating point unit so more operations can be executed per clock cycle while drawing lower power. Other chip improvements include Turbo Core technology, which can increase clock speed by up to 500MHz across all cores and up to 1GHz on some cores depending on the performance required.
AMD in recent months restructured its management, and new CEO Rory Read has said a top priority is to boost the high-margin commercial business. Read acknowledged that customers complained about AMD's inability to deliver products on time, and one of his top priorities was to fix chip manufacturing, shipment and delivery issues.
The Opteron 6200 is an important product in AMD's server road map as it's an anchor product, Mercury Research's McCarron said. "It's part of them getting re-established. They had seen quite a bit of erosion in share over the last year or so," he said.
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