I am sitting in Berlin, Germany right now, and Istanbul is right around the corner, geographically speaking.

But literally speaking, the processor is right around the corner as well, because this week AMD announced that “Istanbul,” the code name for our upcoming 6-core AMD Opteron™ processor, is planned for launch in Q2.

How are we able to pull off such a feat?  Well, to begin with, Istanbul is based on the highly successful “Shanghai” design.  With a highly leveraged core design and a very well-behaved 45nm process, making the leap from 4-core to 6-core was a snap. In addition to the two extra cores added, we also plan to include a new feature called HT Assist, something that I have blogged about in the past.

HT Assist is expected to provide significant memory and I/O performance increases by reducing the overhead of cache lookups.  Think rifle shot instead of shotgun, cutting down on a lot of the inner-chip communications.

So starting with a robust design is half of the challenge, the other half is executing well.  And we have been executing quite well. Shanghai was delivered to market ahead of schedule, and now Istanbul is expected to follow in its footsteps. Normally, when you design any new processor, you allow for several revisions of the silicon before you get to the final production silicon.  When designing in a computer, everything looks fine, but until you start hammering away on actual silicon, you don’t really know how things are going to turn out.  Chemistry, physics and math can be funny that way.

But if you do a great job on the design, and you nail it the first time, you can shave months, or quarters, off of the project schedule.  Our current schedules are a testament to the abilities of our engineering teams around the world.  Our global design centers in Austin, Sunnyvale, India and Boston, toiled around the clock to make sure that Istanbul was a robust design.  Later this quarter, we expect you to be able to reap the rewards of their work.

So what can a 6-core processor mean for you?  If you have well-threaded applications or you are running a multi-threaded environment like virtualization, we expect that they will be able to eat up those extra cores with a smile on their face.  Greater levels of parallelism can help more work get done simultaneously for greater efficiency – and we expect it to all be possible within the same power and thermal levels that you see today with “Shanghai.”  As a matter of fact, we are designing these processors to fit into the same socket 1207 architecture as Shanghai, so you should be seeing Istanbul in all of the old familiar places. Now is a good time to ask your server vendor when they expect to be shipping Istanbul processor-based systems.  (I am guessing that you will like the answer.)

Istanbul is expected to bring 24-core computing to the 4-socket space with true interconnected and scalable performance (not 24 cores on a front-side bus).  And in the 2-way space we expect that you’ll see 12-core systems; providing the perfect balance of performance and power for scale-out virtualization. I’m sure Margaret will have a thing or two to say about that, so keep an eye on our virtualization blog.

Istanbul is the city that lies at the gateway of the world, with one foot in Europe and one foot in Asia.  If your applications are craving the greater scalability only additional physical cores can deliver, then look no further than AMD’s planned six-core Istanbul processor– designed to give you one foot in the world of greater scalability and the other one solidly planted this quarter.

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.