Bladewatch.com

Bit-Tech.net

Intel’s six-core Dunnington Xeon CPUs have already been doing the rounds since September 2008, but AMD’s rival Opteron processors have now finally caught up. The company recently demonstrated its own six-core ‘Istanbul’ CPUs, and the demo included showing off a 24-core, quad-socket server based on the new CPUs.

The Tech Report attended the demo, and revealed some interesting findings. The first factor to note is that Istanbul CPUs will be fully compatible with existing Socket F Opteron systems. To perform a drop-in upgrade to Istanbul processors, the server’s motherboard will just need a BIOS update and support for dual power planes.

Secondly, the performance of the new CPUs appears to scale well, more so than you would expect from the simple addition of more cores. AMD compared a 16-core system based on four Shanghai-based Opterons with a 24-core system based on four Istanbul-based chips, on which you could see all 24 cores in Task Manager on Windows Server 2008. To show the difference between the two machines, AMD ran the Stream benchmark on both machines, in which the Shanghai system managed a throughput of around 25,000MB/sec, while the Istanbul system managed a highly impressive 42,000MB/sec.

I was talking with a colleague about processor improvements and what might be coming soon and he mentioned this article talking about AMD’s new processors, it’s an interesting read, do check it out.

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