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Hot on the heels of Intel’s octo-core Xeon announcement comes AMD with a sexa-core Opteron codenamed Istanbul. The chip has been no secret, but it has surprised onlookers by cropping up in June instead of October as originally planned.
It’s odd to think that I would be using “finally” to talk about our Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processor codenamed “Istanbul.” We were supposed to be launching in October, but the health of the silicon and the fact that the initial version was deemed production ready by our industry partners meant we are looking at “Istanbul” in June instead.
We touched upon the Istanbul’s notable features in our February preview piece entitled “Wild sexa-core Opteron has appeared!” For those of you who missed it, here’s the straight skinny from the boys in green:
- Opteron launch models 2427, 2431, 2435 & 8435
- 128k L1 cache per core
- 512k L2 cache per core
- 6MB L3 cache (shared)
- 2.2-2.6GHz @ 75W TDP
- HyperTransport Assist: Reduces cache probe traffic between processors, which can result in faster queries in 4 and 8-way servers.
- HyperTransport 3.0: Increases interconnect rate from 2GT/s with HT1 up to a maximum 4.8GT/s with HT3.
- AMD-P power management: Includes AMD PowerNow!, AMD CoolCore, and Dual Dynamic Power Management.
- AMD-Vi: Supports I/O level virtualization which provides direct control of devices by a Virtual Machine (VM) (requires SR5690/SR5670 chipsets). Improves component assignment to guest OSes to help improve security for VMs.
Retail Istanbul Opterons have shipped to system integrators and should be appearing in retail products within a few weeks.
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