Posted on Friday, February 20 2009 @ 23:45 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Tech Report
saw a demonstration of AMD's upcoming six-core "Istanbul" Opteron processor.
Istanbul is a fairly straightforward upgrade over current 'Shanghai' Opterons: a 45nm processor with 6MB of L3 cache that fits into a Socket F-style motherboards, only with six cores rather than four. As a result, the upcoming Istanbul-based Opterons will serve as drop-in upgrades for existing Socket F systems. The chips will take advantage of the same 2P, 4P, and 8P infrastructure as today's Opterons, with HyperTransport and two channels of DDR2 memory per socket.
AMD has previously stated that Istanbul processors will become available in the second half of this year, and the firm hasn't yet provided any more specific guidance about when to expect Istanbul-based systems. However, the presence of working silicon would seem to indicate that Istanbul Opterons could be introduced much earlier in that broad "second half" time-frame than originally anticipated.
AMD showed us several demonstrations of Istanbul silicon in action. The first was a simple showing of Task Manager on the Windows Server 2008 desktop, in which the utility showed activity indicators for each of the 24 cores in a quad-socket system.
