12 Core AMD in March

AMD will introduce a twelve-core AMD Opteron "Magny-Cours" processor in March 2010 as xbit labs reported. The mainstream line of twelve-core AMD Opteron 6000-series processors will consist of three chips operating at 1.90GHz, 2.10GHz and 2.20GHz. Besides, AMD will also release highly efficient (HE) and special edition (SE) AMD Opteron 6000 microprocessors with twelve processing engines functioning at 1.70GHz and 2.30GHz, respectively. In addition, AMD plans to launch three standard-voltage eight-core chips at 2.0GHz, 2.30GHz and 2.40GHz frequencies along with two HE eight-core processors at 1.80GHz and 2.0GHz clock-speeds. In order to ensure maximum stability, all AMD’s twelve-core processors will come with reduced clock-speed of integrated memory controller and L3 cache (1.80GHz) compared to six-core and quad-core products.

Even though clock-speeds of AMD Opteron 6000-series processors are not high, AMD will still increase thermal design power of Maranello server platform. Based on preliminary information, AMD G34 (1944-pin) CPUs will have 85W, 115W or 140W TDP, which is somewhat higher compared to TDPs supported by existing multi-processor platforms.

Twelve cores .. that would be phenominal.