Istanbul had an amazingly fast development from first tapeout to final production. Apparently no major respins or redesigns were required to get Istanbul production ready.
Here is a higher resolution shot of the actual Istanbul die. Again, it is amazing that AMD was able to go from tape-out to production ready silicon in such a short period of time.
2003 was the introduction of the original Opteron. AMD expects that the Magny-Cours will almost double performance at the same power envelope that the earlier single Istanbul will run at. In a shock, Magny-Cours was announced to be sampling to partners and is in fact running today at the conference that AMD is putting on.
A bit more information about Magny-Cours, and how the platform will improve/change.
A couple of more pieces of info about AMD’s upcoming server platforms, and what Magny-Cours will bring to the market as compared to what is available today.
The Opteron platform will be split into two parts, with the G34 being the high end part with the 4 channels of U/RDDR-3.
And this little gem was near the end. AMD is very bullish about the performance of the Bulldozer architecture that they will introduce in 2011. Note the faded line, as they are not entirely sure where it will end up… but they believe that it will be very competitive to what Intel has at that time. Note that “Interllagos” is a 16 core product.
Today AMD also announced a series of EE Opterons which run at 40 watts ACP (likely around 55 watts using a more traditional TDP method) as well as some new HE models. The other big announcement was the use of the HT 3.0 connections on these new platforms with EE, HE, and the new Istanbul processors. While the Shanghai core supports HT 3.0, it was not utilized in servers until today. This will only be available in new designs which are fully validated for HT 3.0 speeds/features in server applications.
AMD also uploaded a performance video that deals with Istanbul.
I think it is pretty obvious that AMD is very serious about competing with Intel at the highest levels. While the i7 is certainly a formidable foe, the Istanbul products will allow AMD to compete with Intel in the 1P and 2P platforms, but this processor should give AMD the upper hand when it comes to 4P and 8P servers. AMD has included other optimizations and features in Istanbul that are absent in Shanghai, and we will be hearing about those in the weeks to come.
AMD also uploaded a performance video that deals with Istanbul.
I think it is pretty obvious that AMD is very serious about competing with Intel at the highest levels. While the i7 is certainly a formidable foe, the Istanbul products will allow AMD to compete with Intel in the 1P and 2P platforms, but this processor should give AMD the upper hand when it comes to 4P and 8P servers. AMD has included other optimizations and features in Istanbul that are absent in Shanghai, and we will be hearing about those in the weeks to come.
