AMD Launches 16-Core Opteron 6200 Series, Expands 2012 Road Map

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After a delay of several weeks, AMD Monday took the wraps off its new 16-core Opteron 6200 chips, formerly codenamed Interlagos.

AMD (NYSE:AMD) said the new processors, together with the newly unveiled six to eight core Opteron 4200 chips (formerly codenamed Valencia), will offer enterprises increased performance and scalability for virtualization and more efficient economics for the cloud. The chips are designed to fit into existing server sockets and replace the older 12-core Opteron 6100 series chips.

“Our industry is at a new juncture; virtualization has provided a new level of reliable consolidation, and businesses are now looking to the cloud for even more agility and efficiency,” said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business, AMD. “We designed the new AMD processor for this precise moment.”

The Opteron 6200 Series consists of five chips: the 6262 HE, 6272, 6274, 6276 and 6282 SE. The chips feature clock speeds ranging from 1.6GHz to 2.6GHz and prices from $523 to $1,019.

AMD said the chips are available now, and a number of server vendors, including Acer, Cray, Dell, HP and IBM have announced support for the processors. HP introduced its new ProLiant G7 servers featuring Opteron 6200 Series processors on Monday, saying that the new servers can deliver the world’s fastest dual socket database engine, with up to a 40 percent improvement in throughput over the previous generations of HP ProLiant servers based on AMD Opteron processors.

“Increasing performance and data efficiency while curtailing IT sprawl, complexity and costs in the data center continues to challenge most organizations,” said McLeod Glass, director, Marketing, Industry Standard Servers and Software, HP. “HP ProLiant G7 servers with AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors deliver a new level of compute density to support the most complex high-performance computing applications with fewer nodes and less power.”

Based on AMD’s “Bulldozer” architecture, the new chips are intended for massively scalable applications that require large numbers of threads: databases, cloud applications and high-performance computing (HPC). AMD said it has engineered the chips to provide greater performance with more energy efficiency—for instance, running a greater number of floating point operations while drawing less power. Meanwhile, the Turbo Core technology can dynamically increase the clock speed on the processors as required—up to 500MHz across all cores.

Along with the launch Monday, AMD also expanded its 2012 roadmap with the addition of the AMD Opteron 3000 Series platform. Building on the Bulldozer platform, AMD said the Opteron 3000 Series is targeted at ultra-dense, ultra-low power 1P Web Hosting/Web Serving and Microserver markets. The company said it is designed for hosting customers that require dedicated servers for their customers.

AMD plans to ship the first Opteron 3000 Series chip, codenamed “Zurich” in the first half of 2012. Zurich will be a 4-8 core CPU that leverages the new Socket AM3+.

The company also introduced plans to make embedded server processors designed for high-end embedded systems, including storage, telecommunications and networking infrastructure.

Thor Olavsrud is a contributor to InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.