AMD Launches Piledriver-Based 12 and 16-Core Opteron 6300 Family

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 4, 2012 @11:54PM from the launching-needs-less-wooing-than-unveiling dept.

MojoKid writes "AMD's new Piledriver-based Opterons are launching today, completing a product refresh that the company began last spring with its Trinity APUs. The new 12 & 16-core Piledriver parts are debuting as the Opteron 6300 series. AMD predicts performance increases of about 8% in integer and floating-point operations. With this round of CPUs, AMD has split its clock speed Turbo range into 'Max' and 'Max All Cores.' The AMD Opteron 6380, for example, is a 2.5GHz CPU with a Max Turbo speed of 3.4GHz and a 2.8GHz Max All Cores Turbo speed."

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Shared, but it can be split into two by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-05 01:24 · Score: 5, Informative

Yes, they have a shared 256 bit FPU, but that can be split into two 128 bit parts. So no, multiplying two floating point numbers in two threads is performed immediately and simultaneously, the cores do not wait at all. I measured this on a previous generation Opteron 6234, the performance loss caused by running two threads on two cores of the same module vs two cores in different modules was barely measurable, 3%.