Advanced Micro Devices has begun limited shipments of its
upcoming “Magny-Cours” Opterons, and will launch the high-end processors by the
end of the current quarter.
In a blog
post Feb. 22, John Fruehe, director of product marketing for
server/workstation products at AMD, said
that production of the eight- and 12-core Opteron 6100 chips has begun at the
Dresden, Germany, facilities of Globalfoundries, the manufacturer that was
created after being spun off from AMD in
2009.
Production of the processors began in January, and systems
makers started receiving production parts this month, Fruehe said in the blog.
“We have had a few select end customer opportunities that have
been fulfilled, but it is nothing we can talk about publicly,” he wrote.
Fruehe’s blog comes amid reports that some Magny-Cours chips
have found their way onto eBay, though the chips and servers powered by them
reportedly would not have become available until the day of the chip’s official
launch.
Fruehe admitted the reports prompted him to write the blog.
“As a matter of fact, we were not planning to talk about any of
this just yet, but earlier this week, someone tried to offer products that they
claimed were ‘Magny-Cours’ processors for sale on the web,” he wrote.
“Obviously the message about 12-core goodness with incredible value is making
it out into the market, so much so that somebody wanted to jump on the
bandwagon.”
Magny-Cours is AMD’s entry
into what promises to be a hotly contested competition in the high-end server
space. IBM on Feb. 8 released its first
servers powered by Power7
chips. That same day, Intel announced its long-awaited next-generation
Itanium processor, dubbed “Tukwila.”
Both Intel and AMD are pushing
their x86 processors into high-end environments. AMD
will do that with Magny-Cours this year and “Interlagos,” which will features
12 to 16 cores, in 2011. The new Opterons are aimed at high-end two-socket
servers and those systems with four sockets.
For its part, Intel is preparing to launch the eight-core
“Nehalem EX” Xeon chip for systems with four or more sockets.
AMD officials say the
capability of Magny-Cours to run in both enterprise-class two-socket as well as
four sockets is a key differentiator, giving users of AMD-based
systems a single platform for both.
Magny-Cours also will come with more energy-efficiency and virtualization
features as well as three memory channels, one more than is found on Intel’s
Xeon 5500 Series chips for two-socket systems.
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