Posted 06/12/09 at 08:30:22 AM by Paul Lilly

AMD earlier this month released its six-core Istanbul processor, a launch that came five months ahead of schedule. The Fiorano server platform that will house those chips is still yet to come, and according to The Register UK, there will be two versions of Fiorano. In addition to the standard platform, AMD plans to release a second, low-power platform more heavily focused on high efficiency under the codename Kroner.

Brent Kirby, senior product manager for Opteron products at AMD, said the decision to release a second platform came about in response to feedback from hyperscale server users. According to Kirby, customers said AMD needed to be more aggressive about power efficiency.

Little is known about Fiorano at this time, except that it will suport HyperTransport 3 interconnects, PCI Express 2.0, and I/O Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) technology. Up to eight sockets will be available on Fiorano for up to 48 cores in a single system.

Read More

Posted 06/01/09 at 04:42:48 PM by Andy Salisbury

AMD’s Istanbul processor is finally among us, thanks to an official announcement this morning, stating that the 6 and 4 core versions of the chip have launched.

The Istanbul processor was designed specifically for virtualization, cloud computing and large database applications. And, according to reports, it offers “superior performance and ensures efficient energy consumption.” It’s also expected that an all AMD server platform will be released in the near future.

Thanks to AMD’s manufacturing spin-off, Global Foundries, they were able to release Istanbul five months ahead of schedule.

Read More

Posted 05/28/09 at 05:01:46 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to reports, AMD’s six-core Istanbul server processor is set to be unveiled this upcoming Tuesday.

The chip is slated for its official unveiling at the Computex conference on June 2nd. It is meant to rival Intel’s Dunnington processor, and will sport 6MB of L3 cache to share amongst the cores. Each core will also have 512 KB of L2 cache per, and will presumably feature DDR3 support (depending on the socket).

According to the chip’s lead architect, Hans de Vries, AMD will be pitting two of these against one of Intel’s offering, thanks to the size of the chip. The Istanbul chip is reported to only take up 300 square millimeters, while the Dunnington is expected to take up 700 square millimeters.

Read More