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AMD Starts Shipping First Bulldozer CPU

Posted by Unknown on from the needs-more-cores dept.

MrSeb writes "After an awfully long wait, AMD has finally begun shipment of its Bulldozer-based Interlagos (Opteron 6200) server-oriented CPU. If you believe AMD's PR bots, it is the world's first 16-core x86 processor. Unfortunately, and possibly because of reports that AMD is struggling to clock its Bulldozer cores to speeds that are competitive with Intel's Core i7, there's no word of the 8-core desktop-targeted Zambezi CPU. If AMD doesn't move quickly, Intel's Sandy Bridge-E will beat Zambezi to market and AMD will lose any edge that it might have."

3 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Sandy Bridge-E by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If AMD doesn't watch out their mainline $200 processor will be made obsolete by Intel's $1000 EXTREME CPUs!

    1. Re:Sandy Bridge-E by bhcompy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That $200 is still a fuzzy number given the motherboard prices. You can get a very good AMD chipset(880/890) for $100 and have all the latest features(USB3, SATA3, etc) while being forward compatible for quite a while(manufacturer dependent, but Bulldozer(AM3+) is compatible with AM3 chipsets with BIOS updates). With Intel, you're still paying more for the equivalent and next year you'll need to get another motherboard to upgrade that processor because of constant socket changes.

    2. Re:Sandy Bridge-E by V!NCENT · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Talk to a server farm when Intel is putting money in the development of Coreboot and we'll talk.

      For now AMD is superior, because a server reboot requires about 1/100th of the time that it takes an Intel CPU farm to get back up due to horrible BIOSes. The more motherboards you have, the longer it takes due to serialized bootup. Ouch... Massive ouch...

      Downtime versus marginable CPU speed... And less cores...

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