AMD released today the first native six-core CPU, Anandtech has a look.
If you recall correctly, Intel had already released a six-core part, the Xeon 7400 series, codenamed "Dunnington". Contrary to Intel's design, "Istanbul" was built natively for this purpose and is not a bunch of dual cores glued together to an L3 cache, coupled with a low bandwidth FSB. AMD pumped the HT3.0 speed to 2.4GHz and added HT assist, aimed at reducing latency and bandwidth usage for cache snooping when using 4 sockets or more. 4 way CPU to CPU bandwidth is massively increased in this case, up 60% from around 25GB/s to 41GB/s.
The die size hasn't increased much and power consumption either, maintaining the L3 cache at 6MB helped restrict both but will hold back some performance in particular applications.
Die size is then 346 mm2 compared to 263 mm2 of "Shangai" cores. Xeon 55xx series currently are using 265 mm2 and "Dunnington" six-core used a massive 504 mm2.
Power consumption is well contained at 75W ACP or 115 TDP, the same as the 2.9GHz Opteron 2389, while the clockspeed has been just slightly reduced to 2.6GHz.
Performance is good in some applications, most notably virtualization. It's priced lower than the two top Xeons, but there's a sad lack of HPC benchmarks in the test suite for real comparisions. Most applications benefit the most efficient "Nehalem" architecture but, if priced right, AMD has a good CPU, although it's far from hiting a home run.
AMD has a good CPU in it's hands until Nehalem-EX platforms debut in 2010, and will reign in 4 and 8 socket configurations until that time comes. As for 2 sockets configurations, nothing seems capable of standing up to Intel's products right now but I'm curious to check HPC benchmarks, which typically see no benefit from Hyper Threading.
AMD Opteron 2435 review @ Anandtech
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