AMD Demos 16-Core Opteron Interlagos Chip

Advanced Micro Devices may have managed to snatch some of Intel's CPU market share during the last financial quarter, but it looks like not everything in its camp is going well, now that the latest demonstration of the next-generation AMD Opteron chip was carried out.

The range of Fusion APUs for personal computers that AMD finally delivered this year did manage, to some extent, to impress, especially thanks to their graphics cores.

Unfortunately, it appears that things are not progressing as well on the server segment, where AMD has been hyping up the Opteron “Interlagos” chip.

At a recent event, in Dresden, Germany, the Interlagos saw its latest public demonstration, but the unfortunate part was that only a server from Supermicro was on show and practically no others from AMD's partners.

Considering that the Sunnyvale, California-based company's performance expectations recently slid down, this is definitely not a good sign.

The 16-core Interlagos is based on the Bulldozer micro-architecture and has been the subject of AMD talks for many months, much like the Zambezi 8-core desktop CPU.

This ended up increasing the hype, but after more than a year, there is a visible lack of benchmarking test results or performance estimates and expectations.

The fact that the aforementioned, most recent demo also lacked any sort of update in this regard is, as X-bit Labs found, cause for alarm.

Initially, Interlagos was expected to be 50% better than existing AMD server chips, but subsequent CPU detail leaks did not paint so promising a picture and AMD itself later revised the expectation to a 35% boost (clocks ranged from 3.0 GHz for 8-core to 2.3 or 2.1 GHz for 16-core).

Nonetheless, AMD is, all in all, optimistic and, in the end, just how much of the hype the Interlagos lives up to will become clear at the actual launch, in September.

“The most exciting part is getting to launch. It has been a long journey, it has been over six years that we have been working on this core. It is exciting to bring a new 'from scratch core' to the market. I think the exciting contribution that Bulldozer brings to the market is that it enables scaling with core counts and thread throughput for server and client markets," said Mike Butler, chief architect of Bulldozer core.