AMD began its sixth anniversary of the Operton with the launch of two low-power Opteron EE chips, targeted towards cloud computing or other dense server environments. The company finished up the day with even better news: the official announcement of AMD’s six-core “Istanbul” processor, set for a May release.
For those of you thinking you’ve suddenly missed out on a few months of your life, don’t panic. Originally, the 45-nm Istanbul had been scheduled to ship later in the year, but speaking to financial analysts earlier this week, AMD’s president and chief exec, Dirk Meyer, said that the company decided to "pull in" the timetable. Yesterday afternoon AMD held a news conference to discuss its server roadmap and the company released additional details about Istanbul.
AMD claims the soon to be released processor will produce 30 percent more performance than the existing "Shanghai" quad-core processor at the same power requirements and said we can expect to see systems incorporating Istanbul in June. And just because every announcement made in the processor market these days seems to come with its own little piece of soap opera drama, the Register reports that upon hearing the announcement, Intel had this to say:
"As competitors fall behind in performance, you’ll see them throw more cores and more die size at their processors to keep up. This takes up valuable processor real estate and fab capacity. The key is not I/O, integrated memory controllers, or any one peripheral feature. The key is who has the better processor microarchitecture, and clearly that is Intel."
