Multiple Stupids

There are reports all over the place about AMD's upcoming Opteron X12 processor, which is desgined for 2- and 4-socket motherboards and has 12 cores (except when it doesn't).

The same quote appears over and over:

Provantage is taking orders for Opteron X12 6100 series chips that run at clock speeds between 1.7GHz and 2.4GHz. The chips have 12 cores, with 16MB or 18MB of cache, and draw between 65 watts and 105 watts of power.

Which means that no-one has bothered to think about it.

The X12 (codenamed Magny-Cours) is two Istanbul chips in a single package with an internal HyperTransport link,  providing four memory channels and four external HT links.  Istanbul, which is based on the desktop Phenom II, has 512K of L2 cache per core and shared 6MB of L3 cache.

What that means is that a 12-core processor will have 18MB total cache.

Those 16MB processors are 8-core.  So far as I can tell, no-one has noticed that.

Which leaves the question of why they hell are they called X12 processors when they're really X8?

Update: Oh, yeah, the reason I wrote this is that the cheapest of the X12 chips runs at 2GHz and costs $293.  That would be incredbily cheap for a quad-socket 12-core CPU, even one that runs at 2GHz.  Those chips commonly run to thousands of dollars.  But it's really only an 8-core CPU, which is just terribly disappointing...  Okay, actually, it's still pretty amazing value.  If quad-core motherboards turn out to be affordable (and they could be, because they won't require any special glue logic) then you can build a very nice 32-core system for not a lot of money.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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