Advanced Micro Devices is set to officially release its next-generation series of eight-core and 12-core Opteron processors on March 29, Channelweb.com can now confirm. The Opteron 6100 series of server processors, code-named Magny-Cours, includes five, 12-core chips ranging in clock speed from 1.7GHz to 2.3GHz, and five eight-core parts ranging from 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz.
Additionally, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD plans to release the first processors from the upcoming Opteron 4100 series -- code-named Lisbon -- on May 4, according to industry sources. The Opteron 4100 series includes quad-core and six-core processors optimized for two-socket server and workstation configurations.
With its late March release, Magny-Cours will come on the heels of AMD archrival Intel's launch of its first 32-nanometer Xeon processors later this week. Intel has included six-core server chips in its initial Westmere-class Xeon offering -- matching AMD's last major Opteron launch of its own six-core Istanbul-class chips in June 2009 for the first time with a similar chip architecture called Nehalem.
Magny-Cours is a 45nm processor that marks the end of the line for AMD's long-standing, DDR2-designed Socket F, which has supported successive generations of dual-core, quad-core and six-core Opteron chips since the CPU socket's introduction on Aug. 15, 2006. The Opteron 6100 series will be introduced as part of a new server/workstation platform code-named Maranello and a new socket, Socket G34, that supports four DDR3 channels.
The Lisbon-class processors are built for another platform entirely, code-named San Marino, that utilizes Socket C32.
Here are speeds and feeds for AMD's upcoming Opteron 6100 series processors, according to documents viewed by Channelweb.com. While U.S. pricing was not available for the Magny-Cours lineup, we've included some dollar conversions from Euro prices as reported in February by TechConnect Magazine (big caveat: TechConnect appears to get the clock speeds of the eight-core models very wrong, so the pricing of those parts may prove to be inaccurate as well).
OPTERON 6100 SERIES (MAGNY-COURS)
Opteron 6176 SE (12 cores, 2.3GHz, 105W): No price available
Opteron 6174 (12 cores, 2.2GHz, 80W): $1,477
Opteron 6172 (12 cores, 2.1GHz, 80W): $1,257
Opteron 6168 (12 cores, 1.9GHz, 80W): $948
Opteron 6164 HE (12 cores, 1.7GHz, 65W): No price available
Opteron 6136 (8 cores, 2.4GHz, 80W): $948
Opteron 6134 (8 cores, 2.3GHz, 80W): $670
Opteron 6128 (8 cores, 2.0GHz, 80W): $347
Opteron 6128 HE (8 cores, 2.0GHz, 65W): No price available
Opteron 6124 HE (8 cores, 1.8GHz, 65W) No price available
Notes: All Opteron 6100 series processors are 45nm SOI parts with 512KB of L2 cache per core and 12MB of L3 cache (19.6MB total cache for 12 core parts, 7.1MB total cache for eight-core parts). The I/O bus frequency for all processors is 1.8GHz and maximum I/O bandwidth is 102.4GB/s, with DDR3-133 support of up to 42.7 GB/s memory bandwidth per CPU.
