James Delahunty
22 Apr 2009 21:15
AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) has announced that it plans to produce a server chip with 16 cores, quite a step up from the quad-core server chips currently being marketed. The project is codenamed "Interlagos" and is expected to producer a final product by 2011. Interlagos will follow "Magny-Cours", a 12-core chip AMD expects to bring to release in the first quarter of 2010.
Adding more cores helps to squeeze more performance from servers, helping to cut hardware acquisition and energy costs, said Pat Patla, server platform unit VP. The chip will be part of the Opteron 6000 series of chips, which the company said will likely be used in data-center servers. The 16-core chips could be used in servers with two to four sockets.
"Given the consumer environment and those workloads, it will be a while before 16 cores is mainstream," Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, said. AMD in its future chips will integrate advanced power management features and instruction sets at the chip level to better execute tasks in virtualized environments, users will be able to manually cap the power drawn by cores or simply shut off idle cores.
There are some features missing from the chips however, one being multithreading. "We're not ducking performance," Patla said. He went on to explain that chip improvements are balanced and AMD wants to deliver value without going overboard on features. The new chips will be made using the 32-nanometer manufacturing process.