AMD launches 12 core Opteron 6100 series

Targets the mid-size server market.

AMD is aiming for Intel's server market with its launch of Magny-Cours chips.

The company said Magny-Cours is its biggest achievement since it launched the original Opteron line of processors. It aims to take the fight to Intel on price, performance and power use.

The Magny-Cours family of x86 CPUs, also charismatically called the 6100 series, has eight to 12 cores and is designed for two- or four-socket systems running demanding applications such as databases and virtualisation. The chips also offer higher memory capacity and I/O bandwidth over AMD's existing Opteron chips with four DDR3 memory channels and another HyperTransport 3.0 interconnect channel, bringing the total to four.

"We'll beat the competition on price, performance and power," John Fruehe, director of product marketing for servers and workstations at AMD told us.

"This is on a par with the original Opteron launch. It's going to be very interesting to see how the market reacts to this."

The 6100 series will beat Intel's Xeon on price and performance, and for many computing tasks its power management features will also beat the competition, he said.

He explained that there are three main types of servers. Systems performing day-to-day functions like email and document sharing typically run at 20 per cent average usage levels with a lot of idle time. Servers running virtual machines typically run at 40 to 60 per cent constantly and high performance computing systems run constantly at 80 to 90 per cent capacity.

Magny-Cours improved power management will slash power consumption for servers at rest, making the 6100 series ideal for running day-to-day activities.

The 6100 series processor line is also aimed at rejuvenating the four processor server market by making it easy to update a two processor system to a four processor server with no cost disadvantage. Fruehe called this getting rid of the "4P tax".

In doing so the company is looking to rejuvenate the four processor server market, which has fallen from around 10 per cent of sales down to four per cent.

AMD is also looking to reassure buyers about the upgradeability of their systems. The Magny-Cours line of processors will be upgradeable to AMD's upcoming Bulldozer chips, giving customers a clear upgrade path until at least 2013. Many system vendors are looking to build in the upgrade path with new sales.

At launch AMD's Magny-Cours line of processors has 25 models on offer and one new system vendor, Acer.