First sightings: 6-core Opteron

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First sightings: 6-core Opteron

Saturday, February 21. 2009

Techreport published an article about the upcoming 6 core Opteron "Istanbul". AMD seems to have working silicon. This is an especially interesting news for our X4600 as this system contains a feature to reduce cache coherency traffic on the Hypertransport. The more procs and cores you have in your system, the more this starts to be a challenge and. An system with reduced cache coherency traffic would leave more bandwith for other traffic. The X4600 - a really fast implementation of an 8-socket Opteron system - would be even faster with such reduced traffic. AMD solves this with a directory of memory pages cached in the processor:

Part of the answer, it seems, may be a feature new to Istanbul that AMD calls HT assist (presumably for HyperTransport assist). This feature is what the company calls a probe filter (and may more commonly be called a snoop filter) that functions to reduce traffic on socket-to-socket HyperTransport links by storing an index of all caches and preventing unnecessary coherency synchronization requests

And you have to keep in mind: A X4600M2 with Istanbul would be an 48 core system on 4 rack units. As i wrote before: Interesting technology.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Technology at 16:18 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)
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http://techreport.com/r.x/2009_2_20_AMD_puts_on_the_ritz_with_sixcore_Opteron_demo/card-swap.jpg and http://www.theinquirer.net/img/11564/Istanbul_board_swap.jpg look like an X4600 to me, with smaller front fans.

#1 Olli on 2009-02-24 08:32 (Reply)

I thought the same, but i don´t know if they modified a X4600 for this. On the other side: A soap bubble forms a bubble because it is the natural form for it, perhaps it´s the same for 8-proc servers (and just HP is incorrect about it

)

#1.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2009-02-24 09:48 (Reply)

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