AMD Now Selling 16-Core Processors

After a short delay and a bunch of speculation Advanced Micro Devices on Monday revealed availability for their long-awaited 16-core Opteron server chips.

The Opteron 6200 chipsets are 25 to 30 percent faster than the previous 12-core Opteron 6100 chipsets and will begin shipping in the coming weeks from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cray and Acer.

While the chips are faster they also offer the AMD Bulldozer chip design which offers better bandwidth delivery along with performance improvements that help save power.

The news of the new chipsets couldn’t come at a better time for AMD with its PC market share dwindled down to just 5.5 percent compared to Intel’s 94.5 percent share.

Five chipsets are currently available with 1.6GHz and 2.6GHz option ranging in price from $523 to $1,019. The five procesors are the  6262 HE, 6272, 6274, 6276 and 6282 SE.

According to PCWorld the chips use 85 watts to 150 watts of power and can be plugged into existing server sockets for a quick 12-core chip replacement process.

According to John Fruehe, director of product marketing at AMD:

“The 6200 is targeted at really scalable applications, things that have a lot of threads.”

The processors are meant for use with heavily threaded and virtualized server environments, specifically those created using Linux and Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 operating systems.

If you happen to be in the market for a lower end chipset AMD has also announced availability for their Opteron 4200 chips which offer six to eight cores that run from $125 to $377 with 1.6GHz and 3.0GHz processor speeds available.

Will you be picking up any of the new AMD processors for personal or business use?

[Image via ShutterStock.com]