AMD to Launch 12-Core Server Microprocessors in March – Sources

From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices will launch its twelve-core AMD Opteron “Magny-Cours” central processing units (CPUs) for high-end servers in March, 2010, sources close to the company revealed. AMD plans to unveil a broad family of twelve- and eight-core chips for multi-processor machines with different performance and thermal design power points.

The mainstream line of twelve-core AMD Opteron 6000-series processors will consist of three chips operating at 1.90GHz, 2.10GHz and 2.20GHz. Besides, AMD will also release highly efficient (HE) and special edition (SE) AMD Opteron 6000 microprocessors with twelve processing engines functioning at 1.70GHz and 2.30GHz, respectively. In addition, AMD plans to launch three standard-voltage eight-core chips at 2.0GHz, 2.30GHz and 2.40GHz frequencies along with two HE eight-core processors at 1.80GHz and 2.0GHz clock-speeds. In order to ensure maximum stability, all AMD’s twelve-core processors will come with reduced clock-speed of integrated memory controller and L3 cache (1.80GHz) compared to six-core and quad-core products.

Even though clock-speeds of AMD Opteron 6000-series processors are not high, AMD will still increase thermal design power of Maranello server platform. Based on preliminary information, AMD G34 (1944-pin) CPUs will have 85W, 115W or 140W TDP, which is somewhat higher compared to TDPs supported by existing multi-processor platforms.

The company hopes that its next-generation servers will still offer great performance-per-watt despite of higher power consumption of twelve-core and eight-core chips thanks to increased amount of cores and other innovations of the next-gen platforms. In particular, the new processors will have HyperTransport bus speed increased to 6.4GT/s, which will increase performance scalability, as well as Cool Speed and C1E technologies to reduce power consumption. In addition, it can be expected that Globalfoundries 45nm silicon-on-insulator process technology will improve a bit by the end of Q1 2010.

AMD Opteron “Magny-Cours” processor will be the first chip for the AMD G34 “Maranello” platform designed for Opteron processors 6000-series with up to 16 cores, quad-channel memory interface, 2 or 4 sockets, up to 12 memory modules per socket and some server and enterprise-specific functionality. Magny-Cours microprocessors feature two six-core or quad-core dies on one piece of substrate.

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