ALTHOUGH WE’LL HAVE to wait a little while longer for AMD’s new Magny-Cours based Opteron 6100 series processors to turn up in servers and in retail, European pricing for these 8-core and 12 core processors has turned up ahead of the launch.
Most of us don’t go out and buy an Opteron processor for our home PC, but AMD should have some consumer models coming out at some stage, although most likely with somewhat different specifications. However, if the Opteron 6100 series chip prices are anything to go by, we can see a fair few people getting interesting in investing in at least the most basic model, although the new motherboards and quad-channel memory might be an additional cost that most people won’t be so interested in.
All six models that have made their way onto the web so far have a TDP of 115W, which might seem a little bit hot, but it’s really not too bad considering the core count. Interestingly, both the eight and 12 core models have 12MB of L3 cache as well. They all fit into AMD’s new G34 socket which has a ‘mere’ 1974 pins. Quad channel memory is another interesting feature, although we hope it brings more of a performance enhancement than Intel’s triple channel memory did.
Starting from the bottom up, we have the Opteron 6128 which is an 8-core model clocked at 1.5GHz. It’s priced at €253.49 ($343) according to TCMagazine. Next up is the 6132 which is a bit faster at 1.7GHz and that extra 200MHz nearly doubles the price to €489 ($661). The last 8-core model is the 6136 which is a lot faster at 2.4GHz and also a good bit more expensive at €692 ($935). These prices are still a lot cheaper than all of the AMD equivalent 6-core models, so all in all it’s not a bad deal, although the clock speeds are a fair bit lower. On the upside, these models should work in quad socket configurations, something which used to cost a lot more money.
The 12-core models start with the 6168 which comes in at 1.9GHz and €692 ($935). This is followed by the 6172 at 2.1GHz and €917 ($1,239) and we’re now starting to get into the very expensive territory. Finally we have the 6174 at 2.2GHz which is only small price premium over the 6172, as it’ll set you back €1,078 ($1,457). Even these models come in at near enough half the price of AMD’s 8400-series of 6-core Opteron’s which seems almost too good to be true.
Now all we have to do is to wait for the official word from AMD and of course for some partner mainboards to go with these new CPUs. It does look like AMD is getting ready to take on Intel in the server and workstation space once again and hopefully it’ll have something that appeals to the high-end server manufacturers. There’s a little blurb on AMD’s blog about all this, but it isn’t spilling too many beans yet.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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