AMD announces first Bulldozer chips

AMD has begun shipping the first chips based on its Bulldozer CPU core to vendors, meaning that systems based on the new platform should be available in the near future.

The first Bulldozer product out of the gate is the 16-core Interlagos server chip, expected to be marketed as the Opteron 6200 series, which will be available in systems from vendor partners in the fourth quarter of this year, AMD said.

The new Opterons are high-end server chips, and are expected to be used for datacentre workloads such as virtualisation and cloud computing.

In a statement, AMD senior vice president Rick Bergman hailed the news as "a monumental moment for the industry" that, "represents the beginning of unprecedented performance scaling for x86 CPUs".

However, very little other detail has been disclosed about the new chips, such as clock speeds, exact model numbers or pricing.

The move has also surprised many industry watchers, who were expecting the 8-core Zambezi desktop chip to be the first Bulldozer silicon to launch. AMD told V3 this should arrive before the end of September.