14 DAY TRIAL // Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices is currently planning the release of its much anticipated six-core Opteron processors, codenamed Istanbul. Set to become an upgrade option for today's Opteron-based server systems, the Istanbul chip will be officially introduced next week, prior to the debut of this year's Computex 2009 computer show, held in Taiwan. Although previous reports indicated May 27 as a possible release date for AMD's next-generation Opteron processors, it appears that the chip maker decided to set the official unveiling for early next week, just hours before Computex.
As we reported in previous articles, the next-generation Istanbul processors from AMD will provide business users with an upgrade alternative for their current Opteron-based server systems. This is pretty much due to the fact that these new processors will boast socket compatibility with today's Opteron CPUs, codenamed Shanghai. In addition, the extra 2 cores featured on the new chips will deliver an enhanced performance level, according to AMD, which has repeatedly demonstrated various features that will be available for its next-generation Opteron processors.
Among some of the technical specifications that we are already aware of, we need to highlight that Istanbul is a chip that uses AMD's current 45nm manufacturing technology and boasts 6MB of L2 cache as well as Socket F- compatibility. They are designed to take advantage of some of the currently available technologies, including HyperTransport, support for two channels of DDR2 memory, per socket, as well as the same 2P, 4P and 8P infrastructure.
Earlier demonstrations of the chip have showed a considerable performance increase, compared to AMD's previous generation of server-based Opterons. However, we should know more when the chip maker will officially unveil the new CPUs, consequently removing the NDA for some of the early benchmarkers. According to a recent press release from AMD, the company plans to host a server platform update global webcast, an event that will take place on June 1.