AMD Set to Ship Six-Core AMD Opteron Microprocessors in May to Boost Profitability

From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday said that in a bid to boost sales of its lucrative microprocessors for servers it would start to ship its six-core AMD Opteron central processing units code-named already in May, 2009. The company needs the new chips as although it managed to improve sales of its microprocessors in Q1 2009, the company is still deeply unprofitable.

“I am pleased to announce that because of our strong engineering execution, we are pulling in revenue shipments of Istanbul into May, with systems availability in June,” said Dirk Meyer, president and chief executive officer of AMD, during conference call with financial analysts.

AMD’s six-core Opteron processors code-named Istanbul feature 6MB of L3 cache, dual-channel DDR2 memory controller and are compatible with socket F infrastructure. The only tangible improvement over the quad-core Shanghai processors that the Istanbul chips have (besides increased amount of cores) is HyperTransport Assist feature, which works the same way as Intel’s snoop filter inside high-end chipsets for Intel Xeon processors (keeps cache coherency traffic between the two sockets from appearing on the external bus).

Drop-in compatibility of Istanbul processors with existing infrastucture allows makers of current-generation servers to install higher-performance chips into existing machines and increase their performance-per-watt without any substantial investments into development. It should be noted that since Istanbul chips are still made using 45nm fabrication process, they will not be able to reach the same clock-speeds as quad-core chips.

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