AMD 12-Core ''Magny Cours'' Samples Up And Running

Overclocked, runs 12 cores at an impressive 3GHz.


Impressive, to say the least: current "Istanbul" Opterons run at 2.8GHz in the high end with 1.3v and these new cores are manufactured at the same 45nm process. The new engeneering samples are holding at 3 GHz with just 1.16v, which is also necessary to keep power consumption low.

Also, a screenshot running lower clocks but showing that the system is a dual-socket motherboard, running 24 cores:


The upcoming 12 core beast will fit AMD's upcoming G34 socket and is built of two improved "Istanbul" cores on the same package - akin to Intel's Core 2 Quad - linked together by dedicated HyperTransport links.

The "Magny-Cours" processor itself has 12 MiB of L3 cache(6 per core) but 1 MiB per core is reserved for the new "Probe Filter", which is an aid to reduce cache snooping and enhance cache coherency. Each dual die processor will feature four registered DDR3 memory channels(two per CPU), more than doubling memory bandwidth compared to current "Istanbul" Opteron processors, and even surpassing the current Xeon 5500 series. The processor is expected in Q1 2010 and Intel is set to release the octo-core "Beckton" Xeon sooner than that. "Beckon" is rumored to also have four channels per socket, although of the higher latency FB-DIMM variant.
AMD will again be battling Intel with 50% more cores but may not be able to grab the performance crown in all applications since Intel's architecture has proved to be considerably better clock for clock.


Source: XtremeSystems