Last week we had the pleasure of hosting a select number of reporters to brief them on our upcoming “Istanbul” processor and show them some demos as well.

As always, when you are doing a demo on an unreleased product, you’re always on your toes. It’s like teaching a dog a trick; you worry that it won’t want to do it when your friends are over.

Well Istanbul can fetch, sit up, shake your hand, and apparently, play the piano. Quite a feat. The new 6-core version of the AMD Opteron™ processor is scheduled to be available in the second half of this year, and it is everything we had hoped for – and more.

As a city, Istanbul is the only city that sits on two continents, Asia and Europe. As a processor, Istanbul also bridges two worlds, the socket 1207 that has been such a strong platform in the past, and a 6-core Direct Connect architecture, with 12, 24 or 48 cores per server for the future.

Despite putting more cores in the processor, we managed to keep it in the same power and thermal ranges as our existing “Shanghai” processors. And since it fits into the same socket, our OEM customers should be able to bring products to the market quickly. End users will be able to quickly qualify and deploy these servers because the overall platform is the same as what they are using. In today’s challenging economic times, that’s music to the ears of IT departments both near, and as far away as Turkey.

So what did we show? We showed a platform being easily upgraded from Shanghai to Istanbul, some amazing memory throughput courtesy of the new HT Assist feature, and a 4-socket server with all 24 cores being stressed by one of our development programs.

Watch the videos of “Istanbul” in action (click on “watch in HD” for best viewing experience)

See the images of the “Istanbul” demos

We were impressed by how well the silicon was progressing, when one of the reporters noted “well it should be doing great, it has the same DNA as Shanghai.”

Things are heating up for this year, and we’re excited about where it will be taking us.

Read what the Tech Report had to say

Check out this video that highlights today’s announcement.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.