AMD ships 'Interlagos' Opteron 6200 chips Let the next battle in the x64 server wars begin. Advanced Micro Devices is shipping its 16-core "Interlagos" processors and generating revenue from it, the company announced today. In fact, the Opteron 6200s, as the chips will presumably be called at launch in the fourth quarter, started coming out of the 32 nanometer wafer- …
AMD are trying to battle on value and overall performance. This means, at least for server environments, stuffing as many cores into a box at the lowest power possible.
Their current best low power 6100 is a 65watt 12 core (and hopefully a 16 core soon). For virtual servers this is great. Intel just don't have the core count to compete. And hyperthreading don't count because anybody with half a brain turns it off for virtual environments
For me AMD will always be better for servers.
Good to see AMD shipping the Bulldozer core based CPUs. The opterons are reported to be ~ 35% faster than equally clocked 6100 series and very power efficient. This should make a lot of folks except InHell happy. Reportedly Cray got the first 10,000 CPUs for a super computer they are building.
I was looking forward to this, traditionally I am agnostic when it comes to my processors, but I was looking forward to seeing 16 cores on a chip, leading to some nice performance boost but I doubt that is going to happen with AMD this generation.
There is more to system design than playing 'look at my Ghz..."
Especially in virtualisation a huge role is played by L2/L3 cache sizes, true core to workload ratios, Hyper-Threading and removing the contention between components both at board and system level. At the moment AMD are getting it right in this area - you only have to look at the RAM Speed 'step downs' that XEON forces in dense RAM deployments as much as halving the Speed of the RAM in some instances.
I work on Hyper-dense virtualisation platforms and and run a HPC project lab, we have standardised on the Opteron processors from AMD at the moment as in our experience they have the better performance characteristics. Check out http://tinyurl.com/bx5o73 and http://tinyurl.com/4y85uz9
Certainly not religious about it as have done plenty of Xeon based development for post-production and other intense graphics requirements, but for the moment especially for virtualisation multi-core AMD definitely the right choice. Looking forward to getting hands on in the next few weeks.
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