Processor launches are a funny thing. There’s a whole lot of hoopla over the high end chips with all manner of benchmarks and quotes on how their latest product will make things run faster, cooler, and improve your Crysis framerate all at a low low price. That is of course if your chip is even noticed at all.

AMD launched their “Suzuka” (codename) based quad-core Opterons at around the same time they released their “Istanbul” six-core CPU…you can guess which one got the bulk of the press. The good news is that their latest chip does provide a performance boost while requiring less power to operate.

Here’s hoping they’ll announce that they’ve launched a different chip with some valid merits on a different day in the future.

Source: AMD

AMD’s processors aren’t the type of performance champs you’ve come to expect, on the workstation and server front things tend to get a bit stranger.

People in the market for new servers are looking beyond rendering speeds and are focusing on virtualization performance as their top priority.

AnandTech has a look at the AMD Opteron 2435 “Istanbul” 6-core processor. You’ll likely want to look elsewhere if you want your webserving and render farm performance but its virtualization pedigree is quite nice:

But the six-core “Istanbul” CPU has advantages
too. The Nehalem Xeon offers 8 logical cores, but the two threads on
each core have to share the 32 KB L1 and the tiny 256 KB L2. Istanbul
can work with “only” 6 threads, but each thread gets a 64 KB L1 and an
in comparison copious amount of 512 KB of L2. In a nutshell, It is
clear that the new AMD “Istanbul” Opteron targets a specific market: a
few compute intensive HPC applications, large databases and most
importantly: “heavy” virtualized workload. The reason why we say
“heavy” is that the six-core is a drop-in replacement for the current
quad-core Opterons. That means that the memory capacity of the servers
based on the new six-core will probably be the same. If you are
consolidating lots of light loads together, you are likely to run into
memory limits before you run into processing power limits.

A nice drop-in replacement if you’re up to the task of updating your company’s old servers, which isn’t a bad idea given the current climate.

AMD is setting itself up for a June launch of its next CPU. The chip code named “Istanbul” will fall into its Opteron lineup of workstation and server processors. Given its 6 core design and virtualization focused tweaks it’ll be a compelling chip for the cost cutting crowd while the rest of us look on and drool a bit more.

Source: PC Perspective