(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
Loading ...If you were lucky enough to grow up in the 1970’s, you have to remember Carly Simon singing over a static-filled AM radio that anticipation was “making me late.”
But what if anticipation makes me early? We’ve seen that accurately anticipating customer needs can certainly raise the curtain sooner than expected. What a world we live in.
Customer anticipation over “Istanbul”, AMD’s new six-core AMD OpteronTM processor, is growing every day. Since late last month, when we indicated that the launch was pulling in due to the unprecedented quality of the silicon, the requests have been pouring in. More and more customers are asking when they can get their hands on one of these processors. Soon is all we can say at this point, soon.
The factories are building out parts as we speak and we are ramping up production in anticipation of our launch.
We demonstrated “Istanbul” performance earlier this year , and showed how well it works in a virtualized environment and even showed how systems could be upgraded with amazing speed.
All of this is driving anticipation with our customers, and my team – the main interface between AMD’s system partners and our server division – is constantly fielding the requests for more information, more samples and more customer briefings around these new processors.
We’re pretty excited with how things are shaping up and can’t wait until we can launch the new processor.
The anticipation has been growing, and we’re getting ready to deliver. How much anticipation is out there? Have a listen for yourself. This is Barry Bolding, the Vice President of Scalable Systems at Cray talking about our upcoming processor:
Six cores, six years of AMD Opteron processors. If you look at what we have accomplished in such a short period of time, it’s clear that when we said back in 2003 that we would change the server world forever, we weren’t kidding.
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.
#1 by KTE - May 24th, 2009 at 10:08
While I admit professionally I’m interested in understanding this new processor AMD will be offering and the advancements it will bring from Shanghai – as soon as my work has the samples – we as a community of technology enthusiasts have been more intrigued about the possibilities of Istanbul being offered in the high-end workstation and desktop platforms as a resurrection of AMD’s earlier 4×4 platform in the form of FASN8. That would chiefly depend on how well it scales across the cores, and, across dual-sockets but I’d very much like to hear AMD’s thoughts on this concept (this is being discussed on many online fora already).
From what I know, nothing as such has been formally announced as on the cards.
#2 by John Fruehe - June 1st, 2009 at 16:18
I do not believe that there are any plans to add support for the 4×4 platform, this is an Opteron processor, not an Athlon. There are workstations from partners that will feature Istanbul; these will be announced in the near future.
#3 by Daniel Bowers - May 28th, 2009 at 16:11
John — Congrats on 6 years & 6 cores — looking forward to Istanbul!
Do you know why it’s called “six core” instead of “hex core”? Was the idea that the Greek prefixes would start getting too strange as core counts rise?
#4 by John Fruehe - June 1st, 2009 at 16:11
It’s an interesting question. While the word “hex” accurately reflects the number in Greek, in English, the word “hex” can have some negative connotations, so we chose the modifier “six”.