AMD claims four-socket power at two-socket price

The Opteron 6100 is the first 12-core x86 processor

AMD will today unveil its Opteron 6100 processors with eight to 12 cores, which it expects will meet demand from customers for systems more powerful than current two-socket servers, but without the hefty price tag of four-socket models.

Available immediately, the Opteron 6100, codenamed Magny-Cours, is designed for two- or four-socket systems running demanding applications such as databases and virtualisation.

The new chips also offer an increase in memory capacity and I/O bandwidth over existing Opterons through four DDR3 memory channels and an extra HyperTransport 3.0 interconnect channel, bringing the total to four.

Leading vendors such as Dell, HP and Acer are expected to have systems based on the new platform for sale almost immediately, AMD said.

Leslie Sobon, AMD's vice president of product and platform marketing, explained that the company is aiming to "turn the volume server market on its side" and introduce a new vector of price/performance per watt.

"The market is currently asking 2P servers to do a lot. At the low end, they are competing with 1P servers based on a desktop architecture, while at the high end 2P servers are used by customers that want 4P but can't afford it," she said.