It’s odd to think that I would be using “finally” to talk about our Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor codenamed “Istanbul.” We were supposed to be launching in October, but the health of the silicon and the fact that the initial version was deemed production ready by our industry partners meant we are looking at “Istanbul” in June instead.

We started shipping production units in May and today we are rolling out the red carpet to introduce “Istanbul” to the world.  Over the next few weeks you’ll see our industry partners launching their “Istanbul”-based platforms.

So where do customers want to use these two extra cores?  They want them in their databases, in their virtual environments and in their HPC/technical applications.  Six cores will allow an application to break up problems into smaller chunks for a more parallelized completion of tasks. 

We have been rapidly moving from a world of serial tasks to a world of parallel tasks.  And as this happens, having more cores helps applications run more efficiently.  Elegant design has won out over brute force in software programming. Not too long ago a single core processor delivered all of the performance that a customer needed, but now, as operating systems and applications have become more threaded, the need for more cores is becoming far more important.

So, this is the death of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed “Shanghai,” right?  Hardly.

There are still plenty of applications that are less threaded and will enjoy the higher clock speed of our four core processors.  The two products can live side by side in the product line, allowing customers to meet a wider range of application needs, all with a common platform underneath. Best of all, we offer both the four-core and the six-core for a range of platforms, from 2P to 4P and even 8P.  No other company on earth offers the same commonality across that range of configurations. Only AMD delivers consistent four-core and six-core configurations across all of the different form factors, from the low-end 2P 8-core systems to the high end 8P 48-core systems.  There is choice and flexibility across a highly scalable family of platforms from the leading server vendors.

With “Istanbul” we take the first important step towards the “high-low strategy” that we laid out in April.  “Istanbul” meets the needs for high performance/highly scalable applications that crave more cores and more parallel processing.  “Shanghai” fills the bill for those applications that need fewer cores and are focused more on energy efficiency or cost-effectiveness.

As the market continues to move in these two directions, we plan to be there with the product that customers need to handle their critical applications.

Now that Istanbul is “finally” out the door my wife asked me if things would quiet down and could I relax a little more.  How do I break it to her that things are just getting started?

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.