AMD Launches 8 and 12-Core Opteron CPUs

That will be remarkable. Look forward to the time when Programs such as Revit will utilize more than 8 cores in it's rendering capabilities.

As a software developer, I feel guilty about still writing programs for single cores...

dman3k .. I feel your guilt, but the reality is most of the software I write would benefit at most from 2 cores and with today's processors 98% of the time 1 core is sufficient to keep up with the speed of the user (and I write software for other programmers who are usually, though not always, some of the most hard core users). Modern servers need multiple cores to do multiple different tasks.

The people who need to get on with multiple core development are starting to do that, finally.

I'd like to see 4 of those in a server mobo. 5000$ for 48 cores. "$ make -j50"

How about we max out Quad-Core CPUs before we start delegating more code?

Look at how much was accomplished on just single-core CPUs over the years. Now we have Dual and Quad-Cores, yet the entire industry is already taking the easy route and just dividing up the work across multiple cores, as opposed to good old-fashioned optimization...

I weep for today's programmers. In my day, we had 3 months to get a game to run on 1 CPU AND it had to work out of the box! No patches or updates! Our company's entire reputation was based on the final, retail release of our games!

You kids got it easy these days. You can ship unfinished code and just update it whenever you want, using the "online experience may vary" crutch.

(doh, sorry - went off on a rant there. move along)

There was a giveway here a while back,

in THIS day, development cycles are longer and much more costly. developers are expected to put in much more work, and deal with much more complex issues. as a result we have much more advanced software, that is being constantly updated free of charge, and most importantly it can scale to more powerful multi-core systems allowing enthusiasts to benefit from increased performance more than ever.

don't rant about the 'good old days' in an industry driven by hard work and immensely talented individuals. the industry is stronger now than its ever been, so don't bash progress because you think devs have it easy.

Looks like AMD is having no trouble squeezing out cores.. Although i cannot stop myself thinking about the superior INTEL counterparts which, when they arrive, would cause AMD to lower down the prices and wave the better price/performance flag.. Not a bad tactics i guess though.. It pays after all to be the first in the line..

Why not just spend that money on a mid-entry MacPro? lol

ugh... if you are talking about desktop/laptop CPU... you are right about it.

But here we are talking about Opteron which is targeting on the server market. At the server level, software optimized for multi-trend, multi-core, or parallel processing is very common.

LOL Mac Pro....some people just make me crack up.

There is a review on the internet, Anandtech,

AMD 12cores loses to intel's new 6 core xeon. However, if to think outside of the box, I don't care. It costs less and performs less at the same margine, so in the end, it is competitive cpu for its money

Seriously, you can get a dual quad-core xeon based macpro @ 2.26Ghz. 8 cores, 16 threads, 12gb ram for 4999...

And you can also build one for less than half

Man they are insane huh!

I really love to have 48 core for my mental ray and vray renderengin. is a idea machine for artist who work and preview their working result. thank you amd to make it happen. I have my 32 core 8 way server running at my studios 24/7, it rocks.

" and a 119-percent increase in floating point performance."

surely it would be more efficient to use GPGPU if you were in need of FP performance?

Opteron utilization has absolutely nothing to do with a program using multiple cores, they are primarily for VMware and other environments that already use however many cores you pay to license.


Well, the software on the class of box usually costs several times more than the box itself. If you can get a 10% improvement for an extra $2k, it may be a drop in the bucket in the purchasing party's point of view. Enterprise servers aren't about squeezing every dime out of hardware, it is about maximizing performance and stability.

Ok so raytracing on the gpu is certainly doable in realtime on the CPU. You gotta figure if you have more trees internally you want to do it CPU side however if less branching you could do on the GPU side for the greater FP throughput. Ah isn't it fun to have all these resources ;-)

I can't help but laugh. I also read the anand article, and the 6-core Xeons performed (mostly) better than the 12-core opterons... Still. 12 cores is like 2 processors for the price of one.

Updated for free because half the crap released doesn't work as advertised out of the box, or in some cases at all. In the case of games, it's hard to think of a single major release this year that wasn't hosed on launch.

Don't pretend like commercial software companies primarily use the update process as a "value-add" to include new features rather than to patch the beta/swiss-cheese code they pushed onto consumers as a final product.

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the the far and few between for-profit developers that follow the add new features for free model, but I'd rather be stuck with a strictly predefined feature set and a product that does as advertised, without crashes, or limitations upon first use.

So, don't rant about "an industry driven by hard work and immensely talented individuals" where a comparable quality product in another industry would not only result in mass-returns, but also many lawsuits. Toyota anyone? Yeah, they can update that too, right?

You're industry is the most protected. FFS, you can't return retail opened software, even if the actual product is completely non-functional, only exchange in case of bad media. Until software companies have to start accepting responsibility for the constant string of failures, I'm not going to wait for you to come down off your soap box, I'll come kick it out from underneath of you.

Crap. I One upped you, I thought you were joking...

If you REALLY read Johan's article, the comparison was somewhat of a mixed bag. In the conclusion, he warned IT Admins to carefully consider their workloads, as that would tell them which processor was their best buy.

These prices don't mean much to the end customer. I just checked HP's site and the xw9400 workstation with the previous generation 6-core Istanbul has the low end 2.2 GHz Opteron 2427 pegged at whopping $1900 (the CPU alone). The top 2.6 GHz Opteron 2435 option was $3500. For comparison, the online prices are $450 for 2427 and $1K for 2435. The configuration I put together with the 6-core Opteron 2427 cost south of $6K... (And that's with the lowest end graphics card too, but it did include 2x 15K RPM SAS drives and a SAS controller.)

I couldn't find a single Opteron workstation model on Dell's site, but we know Dell's relations with AMD aren't exactly stellar...

Magny-Cours = Many-Cores

I would say it's about stability, then nothing for a long time and then performance and power consumption.

Where's the Phenom II X6?

To true. I remember when I bought GTA vice city, kept freezing, went back to eb games, exchange only, ok. Get back home, same problem, had my mother switch again. 3rd copie same f'ing problem wtf!!!! Still can't return for refund. That game overheated old gen ps2's I guess (had the gt3 bundle), hence the crashing, I had to open my ps2 and place a stove top fan on it just to play the damn game. GTA 4 (lol rockstar?) was another perfect example, I was running at 6-12 fps in a dual core 3.2 with a 4850 & 4 gigs ddr2, with all settings at minimum, wtf is 6 fps??? Still couldn't return it although Steam accepted returns, not everywhere did...

Anyways I can't wait to see a 12 core desktop cpu =D, can't wait to see what it will be like in 2 decades (but please no f'ing cloud computing forced on all home users :|....)

so intel launched yet? or latter

Give me more cores! I am in the process of designing a security program that will take advantage of the massive parallelization of modern CPU's and GPU's. This parallel processing is necessary to crunch the amount of data this system will be handling and still retain acceptable performance.

We are on the cusp of an information interface revolution. Once rich, viable 3d interfaces become mainstream, this parallel processing will be necessary. When it begins to happen it will be quick. You will see all the major players quickly adopt this technology. The webpage you are viewing now will seem prehistoric by comparison.

At what point will adding more cores become impractical? What is the point of dimishing returns?