AMD kicks Intel with six-core processor

AMD launched its first six-core processor, which will compete against Intel's "Dunnington" chip. The "Istanbul" Opteron processor is for high-end server computers that use two, four, and eight processors or "sockets." Intel has been shipping a six-core processor for this market since September of last year and will bring out a processor based on its new Nehalem architecture for this segment later this year. The Istanbul processor is slated for mass-availability sometime in mid 2009 and will directly compete with Intel's six-core Dunnington chip. According to the die-shot, the new AMD chip will feature 6 MB of L3 cache shared among all the cores. Each core, however, will come with 512 KB of L2 cache.

It is expected to come with either DDR2 or DDR3 support, depending on the CPU socket. While the backwards-compatible AM2+ chip will feature DDR2 support, and AM3 version will only work with DDR3. Systems based on six-core AMD Opteron processors are expected to be available beginning this month from server suppliers including Cray, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, AMD said Monday. Istanbul boasts up to 34 percent more performance-per-watt over the previous-generation quad-core processors.

(Source: http://www.chip-architect.com, http://news.softpedia.com,http://news.cnet.com/)