AMD ships 8 and 12-core Magny-Cours

AMD has announced recently that it has begun shipping 8 and 12-core Magny-Cours Opterons to OEMs beginning this month.

“Production [of Magny-Cours chips] began last month and our OEM partners have been receiving production parts this month,” said John Fruehe, Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation products at AMD.

Magny-Cours

Family: Stars (Phenom II)
Cores: 8-12
Process: 45nm
Socket: G34
Memory: Quad channel DDR3
Platform: Maranello
Role(s): HPC, clusters, virtualization

The Magny-Cours is an exceptionally neat processor that combines two hexa core Istanbul Opterons with a HyperTransport link. Pull off the die cover, shown right, and you’d find two independent CPU dies–this architecture is known as an MCM, or multi-chip module.

Launching with clockspeeds of 1.5-2.4GHz (eight cores) or 1.9-2.2GHz (twelve cores),  Magny also features 128K L1 per core, 512k L2 per core and 12MB shared L3, and a 115W TDP, along with power management functions that can take the chip as low as 800MHz.

Maranello Platform

Targeting HPC, virtualization, and databasing, the Maranello platform leads AMD’s new platform strategy. Featuring a whopping 1974 pins, Maranello’s Socket G34 not only has the pins to support quad-channel DDR3, but also to rock the veritable spider’s web of HyperTransport links required to keep all the Magny-Cours cores talking to one another.

Pricing

AMD has not officially revealed the pricing scheme behind the new Opteron 6100 series, but various retailers across the web have already revealed the following SKUs.

Meanwhile, retail availability should begin within the next 45 to 60 days.