Good things come in packs of 24, and AMD’s Istanbul can be included among that group.  The Tech Report has pictures of a four socket system with four 6-core Istanbul processors, for a rather impressive task manager.  Perhaps even more impressive is that with specific Socket F motherboards, a BIOS flash is all it will take to allow you to drop one of these new Istabul chips in for a hefty upgrade.  Follow the link to see just how hefty.

“AUSTIN, TEXAS – With Intel’s Nehalem-based Xeons gathering like a storm on the horizon, AMD today gave the first working demonstration of its potential counterpunch: a six-core Opteron processor code-named “Istanbul.” Istanbul is a fairly straightforward upgrade over current ‘Shanghai’ Opterons: a 45nm processor with 6MB of L3 cache that fits into a Socket F-style motherboards, only with six cores rather than four. As a result, the upcoming Istanbul-based Opterons will serve as drop-in upgrades for existing Socket F systems. The chips will take advantage of the same 2P, 4P, and 8P infrastructure as today’s Opterons, with HyperTransport and two channels of DDR2 memory per socket.”

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