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Wolfe's Den
AMD Looking Like Server Winner With 6-Core Istanbul Opteron
One top-line comparison appears on TechReport, which found in its test that "Istanbul's showing represents a solid advance over Shanghai [which is the current quad-core Opteron]." While TechReport found that a Xeon 5550 system inched out the Istanbul Operton 2435 on a specific SPECpower benchmark, it rendered this positive verdict: "Make no mistake, though: this Istanbul system is very much a match for the Xeon in terms of power-efficient performance." Speaking to the back-compatibility of Istanbul, TechReport added: "If you have existing, compatible Socket F servers, the Istanbul Opterons should be an excellent drop-in upgrade. They're a no-brainer, really, when one considers energy costs and per-socket/per-server software licensing fees."
The AnandTech piece, by Johan De Gelas, comes to the conclusion that the Xeons are generally more versatile but that: "There are two types of applications where we feel that the AMD six-core deserves your attention: decision support databases and virtualization." Also -- and this is a big deal as far as the high-end, four-socket-server market -- De Gelas says this: "The six-core Opteron will be a formidable competitor in the 4P market segment." There are a lot of interesting, high-end implementations around, in 4- and 8-socket configurations, and more. For example, Microway has a product it calls Navion, which packs two Istanbuls in each 1U node. You can cram a whole bunch of those thin nodes into a larger rack, to create a cluster with a density of 960 cores and 240 TBytes of storage. This movement to ever higher densities -- both on the processor and server level -- won't end anything soon. Visual proof is posted over at SemiAccurate.com, where Charlie Demerjian has acquired pictures of upcoming motherboards containing Magny Cours, which is the 12-core part due from AMD in 2010. Here once again are some recent AMD Istanbul (and Intel Nehalem) slides:
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