AUSTIN, TEXAS — With Intel’s Nehalem-based Xeons gathering like a storm on the horizon, AMD today gave the first working demonstration of its potential counterpunch: a six-core Opteron processor code-named “Istanbul.” Istanbul is a fairly straightforward upgrade over current ‘Shanghai’ Opterons: a 45nm processor with 6MB of L3 cache that fits into a Socket F-style motherboards, only with six cores rather than four. As a result, the upcoming Istanbul-based Opterons will serve as drop-in upgrades for existing Socket F systems. The chips will take advantage of the same 2P, 4P, and 8P infrastructure as today’s Opterons, with HyperTransport and two channels of DDR2 memory per socket.



AMD has previously stated that Istanbul processors will become available in the second half of this year, and the firm hasn’t yet provided any more specific guidance about when to expect Istanbul-based systems. However, the presence of working silicon would seem to indicate that Istanbul Opterons could be introduced much earlier in that broad “second half” time-frame than originally anticipated.



AMD showed us several demonstrations of Istanbul silicon in action. The first was a simple showing of Task Manager on the Windows Server 2008 desktop, in which the utility showed activity indicators for each of the 24 cores in a quad-socket system.




Simple, yet impressive for what it indicated. The second demo was conducted on a dual-socket system with 12 cores. The main OS was Windows Server 2008, but the system also hosted three separate virtual machines: one each for Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux, and SLES 11 x64. Each VM had four cores dedicated to it.