AMD Unveils Opteron 6000 Series Pricing

AMD has released its 'Magny-Cours' line of eight- and 12-core Opteron server processors. As noted in this Hardware Central report, AMD feels its real competitive story is in performance per watt and making four-socket, or 4P, more affordable. The Opteron 6000 carries a price range of $99 to $455 for the eight-core and $266 to $1,386 for the 12-core models.

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The Opteron 6000 series, the formal name for Magny-Cours has four DDR3 memory channels to the new Intel Xeon 5600's three channels.

"It's a competitive time in the server market, even as server sales have been fairly anemic. With one-third of servers deployed still using old, single-core processors, the market may be on the cusp of a major upgrade push. Not surprisingly, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) have responded by coming out with faster and more powerful multi-core processors to support virtualization and high-performance computing.

"The Opteron 6000 series, the formal name for Magny-Cours, puts two six-core 'Istanbul' cores on one die and connects them with a high-speed HyperTransport connection. The eight-core design has four deactivated cores, just as AMD does when turning quad- into triple-core Phenom processors.

"The new series has four DDR3 memory channels to the new Intel Xeon 5600's three channels, which translates into a larger memory footprint, noted John Fruehe, director of product marketing In AMD's server and workstation business."

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