AMD Rolls Out "Warsaw" Opteron CPUs With 12 and 16 Cores
AMD brings out new server-grade chips with up to 16 cores.
AMD today released two new Opteron chips based off the company's "Piledriver" core. Part of the 6300 series codenamed "Warsaw", the 6370P packs 16 cores and the 6338P has 12 cores. Both of these new processors are fully socket and software compatible with the existing AMD Opteron 6300 Series.
AMD boasts that the new Opterons are ideal for the Open 3.0 Open Compute Platform, complex compute needs of data analysis, xSQL and traditional databases, citing reasons of power efficiency and cost effectiveness. Specifically, these Warsaw parts have a TDP of 99 W. As far as cost effectiveness, the 16 core model is priced at $598 and the 12 core $377.
AMD Opteron 6370P 16-core model"With the continued move to virtualized environments for more efficient server utilization, more and more workloads are limited by memory capacity and I/O bandwidth," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, AMD. "The Opteron 6338P and 6370P processors are server CPUs optimized to deliver improved performance per-watt for virtualized private cloud deployments with less power and at lower cost points."
Model Number | Cores | Base Frequency | Max AMD Turbo CORE frequency | TDP | Memory support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
6370P | 16 | 2.0 GHz | 2.5 GHz | 99W | Quad channel U/RDDR3 up to DDR3-1600; ULV and LRDIMM support |
6338P | 12 | 2.3 GHz |
2.8 GHz | 99W | Quad channel U/RDDR3 up to DDR3-1600; ULV and LRDIMM support |
For a look at how Piledriver stacks up for gaming, check out AMD Piledriver And K10 CPU Architectures Face Off.
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I could see this competing and makes me interested.
I could see this competing and makes me interested.
Kaveri isn't anywhere close to Haswell clock for clock. In single thread, fixed clock tests, Kaveri's Piledriver cores get a hell of a kicking from Haswell's cores.
I could see this competing and makes me interested.
Kaveri isn't anywhere close to Haswell clock for clock. In single thread, fixed clock tests, Kaveri's Piledriver cores get a hell of a kicking from Haswell's cores.
When only one virtual core is getting used, modern OSes will sleep the other cores, which causes Intel's CPUs to disable hyperthreading, which allows all of the resources of a cpu core to be dedicated to the single thread.
When it came to the multi-core benchmarks, Kaveri was basically tied with Haswell in most benchmarks and only slightly behind in a few others. Almost any game that uses more than one virtual cpu worth of computing will benefit since HT will remain enabled, which puts Kaveri on par with Haswell.
Since we're talking about server CPUs, my guess is this is most of the time. I would like to see some benchmarks comparing the two to see if my theory is even close, like within 20%.
I could see this competing and makes me interested.
Kaveri isn't anywhere close to Haswell clock for clock. In single thread, fixed clock tests, Kaveri's Piledriver cores get a hell of a kicking from Haswell's cores.
When only one virtual core is getting used, modern OSes will sleep the other cores, which causes Intel's CPUs to disable hyperthreading, which allows all of the resources of a cpu core to be dedicated to the single thread.
When it came to the multi-core benchmarks, Kaveri was basically tied with Haswell in most benchmarks and only slightly behind in a few others. Almost any game that uses more than one virtual cpu worth of computing will benefit since HT will remain enabled, which puts Kaveri on par with Haswell.
Since we're talking about server CPUs, my guess is this is most of the time. I would like to see some benchmarks comparing the two to see if my theory is even close, like within 20%.
Hyper threading can be resumed as just being the ability of one physical core dealing with two threads at once for better usage of the pipeline. It barely have any impact in single threaded scenarios, that are where the IPC is measured.
What Haswell (and both current and older AMD and Intel as well) do to improve the single threaded performance when only one core is being used is to boost the clock using the thermal headroom. Basically, a dynamic over clock. Naturally you must know it.
Kaveri tied a dual core Haswell at multi threaded benchmarks. Even though Kaveri's Piledriver modules shares a FPU, they still have the other core physical parts. Speaking clearly, four Piledriver modules (cores) tied two Haswell cores. When benchmarked against a comparable priced Haswell quad core, Kaveri is left behind by a large margin.
That's why I said that Haswell has the upper hand in clock per clock performance. There are countless tests to prove that and it has nothing to do with hyper threading or turbo boost, since those tests are made with fixed clock and only one core (or module) is used on both processors.
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Also, don't mistake TDP for power consumption. TDP is the measure of how much heat a processor dissipates, in watts. A TDP of 95W does not means that the processor draws just 95W from the wall.
While it's true that it's amazing to pack 16 cores under a 95W TDP, you should notice that AMD do this using the relief from the GCN inside Kaveri, that combines in a 95W TDP package four piledrive modules, 512 GCN "cores" and things such as the memory controller.
Using lower frequencies (and thus lower voltage), AMD uses the thermal room provided by the omission of the GPU to pack so many cores in a 95W TDP chip.
What's great about Warsaw is it's price. I truly don't expect to see 16 piledrivers modules at low clock beating upcoming Xeons that packs 12 higher clocked Haswell cores in most scenarios. The offering for just US$500 is what makes Warsaw interesting.
While this is generally true for POWER semiconductors where the TDP is related to the maximum power dissipation within the SOA under a given set of operating parameters and tend to prematurely fail when operated beyond that after all applicable deratings, for chips like CPUs that have tight operating voltage ranges and much lower temperature ceilings, the TDP usually refers to worst-case power draw under otherwise normal operating conditions. CPUs can operate a fair bit beyond their nominal TDP with adequate cooling.