New Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor Delivers Up to Thirty-Four Percent More Performance-per-Watt in Exact Same Platform

AMD today announced availability of the world’s first six-core server processor with Direct Connect Architecture for two-, four- and eight-socket servers. Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors (code-named “Istanbul”) extend AMD’s commitment to offering server customers superior value at every price point with unmatched platform flexibility.

Across a single platform, AMD can address the need for more cores and greater scalability with the new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor and offer a cost- and power-efficient solution with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. Systems based on Six-Core AMD Opteron processors are expected to be available beginning this month from leading OEMs including Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems, along with support from motherboard and infrastructure partners. HE, SE and EE versions of the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor are planned for the second half of 2009.

The most notable change of Istanbul is the addition of a feature AMD calls HT Assist. HT Assist is essentially a probe filter intended to reduce the overhead required for the synchronization of cached data across CPUs in multiple sockets. HT Assist reserves space in each processor's L3 cache, in which it stores an index of where that CPU's cache lines are being used system-wide. The CPU then becomes "host" of the cache lines stored in its directory. If any CPU needs an update about a particular cache line, it will often know which CPU is the correct host to probe for that information. AMD says HT Assist can replace broadcast probe requests (sent to all sockets) with directed requests in 8 of 11 typical CPU-to-CPU transactions. This reduction in probe traffic can yield big gains in available system bandwidth, whose Stream bandwidth increased from roughly 25GB/s to 42GB/s with the addition of Istanbul processors with HT Assist.

Reviews:
Tech Report

AMD Demonstrates 6-Core Istanbul

Tech Report looked at a demo of the 6-core Istanbul Opteron.

AMD showed several demonstrations of Istanbul silicon in action. The first was a simple showing of Task Manager on the Windows Server 2008 desktop, in which the utility showed activity indicators for each of the 24 cores in a quad-socket system.



The second demo was conducted on a dual-socket system with 12 cores. The main OS was Windows Server 2008, but the system also hosted three separate virtual machines: one each for Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux, and SLES 11 x64. Each VM had four cores dedicated to it.

The third demo was the most interesting for a couple of reasons. First, because it was intended to show how Istanbul can serve as a drop-in upgrade for Socket F systems. The only requirements: the system must support split power planes, and it must have a BIOS upgrade to operate with the new processors. Second, the demo was impressive because it included a performance test. Two otherwise-identical systems were situated side by side: one with a quartet of Shanghai Opterons, the other with four Istanbul chips. Both systems were running with HyperTransport 3 active—a capability coming soon to Shanghai Opterons but not yet available in current products. To illustrate the performance difference between the two boxes, the AMD tech ran a Stream benchmark. The 16-core Shanghai system produced throughput numbers in the range of 25,000 MB/s. The 24-core Istanbul box, by contrast, hit about 42,000 MB/s.

Shanghai:

Istanbul:


Scheduled to launch in the second half of this year, “Istanbul” is expected to be the only x86 six-core processor available for two and four-socket systems and higher.

This video indicates the consistency of AMD's architecture and upgrade from the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors to Six-Core AMD Opteron Processors (Istanbul):



The second video shows Istanbul running on a 2P virtualization platform, highlighting Istanbul's virtualization capabilities:



Thanks to a reader who informed me about those videos :-)