With these parts already hitting the retail channel, AMD and their partner at GLOBALFOUNDRIES must certainly be pumping these processors out at an impressive rate. While the economic downturn has certainly cut expenses for many companies in this area, a new part such as this is usually under tremendous demand at first. Fulfilling OEM orders comes first, and then parts start to trickle out to retail. Note that these are not the highest end offering of the Istanbul parts, so we can assume that those chips are heading to the OEMs/ODMs first. Of course, in a worst case scenario, AMD is not producing many of these, but the demand is so poor that they are already hitting the retail channel. From what we have been led to believe though, that is not the case. There is a lot of interest in these new parts, and AMD has provided a more cost effective, and overall better performing part, than the Intel Dunnington based processors.
These chips are the 2000 series of parts, which means they are aimed at the 1S and 2S marketplace. No 4S for these. The 8000 series of chips will be needed for 4S systems, and the prices on those are significantly higher (think around $2500 US for starters).
For people wishing to build their own, we can see guys like Tyan putting out a solid, yet inexpensive, 1U white box setup. All that is needed are the basics such as processors, memory, and hard drives. Everything else is included in the box, and for $899 it is a pretty tremendous deal. Throwing in two of the 6 core processors, as well as high speed hard drives, and plenty of memory, will give you a hefty machine for around $3000 US. Thanks to Randy for the head’s up.
