AMD Battles Intel with its 12-Core Chip

Catering to servers manufacturers, both Intel and AMD have begun adding cores to boost chip performance. In an effort to out-do Intel, AMD is already shipping its Magny-Cours processors, which will be called Opteron 6100 after they officially launch, and server chips will be officially announced later this month. As noted on PC World, to best Intel, AMD is also awarding big cash prizes to those who can best describe how to use 48 cores in a server.

"Intel and AMD reverted to adding cores to boost chip performance earlier in the decade, as cranking up clock speed led to excessive heat dissipation and power consumption. Adding cores to server chips continues, even though the battle has cooled off at four cores for consumer desktop and laptop processors, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

"Servers manufacturers are always looking to boost performance, and thousands of cores are being added to supercomputers in the high-performance computing space to do complex math calculations, McCarron said.

"AMD's 12-core chip will provide good boost in performance over Intel's Westmere-EP chips as it has more computing resources at work, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. However, the real battle will be between AMD's 12-core Magny-Cours and Intel's eight-core Nehalem-EX chip, which are both targeted at four-socket servers."

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