AMD drops a 12 (TWELVE) Core Opteron

[Trick]

http://www.amd.com/us/products/serve...-platform.aspx

I try to keep up with AMD's offerings, but when my son surprised me with this being listed at NewEgg over the weekend I had to do a double-take. The last AMD roadmap I saw had 12-core slated for 2011, not Q2 2010.

Unlike the 6-core Xeon which is hitting the wallet for $2,000, this 12-core Opteron is currently available for just under $800.

SuperMicro even has a single CPU board ready for this beast, though I've not yet seen pricing.
http://www.supermicro.com/G34/AMD_G34.cfm?pg=MOBO
Supports up to 32GB of unbuffered RAM, or if you want to go completely nuts and stuff it with Registered ECC then you can push both the board and the CPU to 128GB

Edit: Forgot to mention quad-channel memory too...

[Fursphere]

That's impressive. Its also about the same $$ per core vs. the current Core2Quad CPUs.

I would like to see benchmarks against the 6 core Xeons though.

[Pycno]

But can it run Cryzis?

[Kicksome]

Wow - that board support 4x 12 core processors. So 48 processors! Wow.

[Trick]

I would like to see benchmarks against the 6 core Xeons though.

And AnandTech is ready to provide
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2978/a...-6-core-xeon/1

Now they only tested server workloads, but the end result seems to be the same. If you are running one or more apps which will actually use more than 6 cores then the AMD is your guy. But if you can't have enough threads running to reach out beyond 8 cores, then you are better off with the higher clock speed Xeons. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd rather have more hardware cores.

Also, the review turned me on to a much cheaper alternative with this new AMD line -- The AMD Opteron 6128 8-core CPU @ 2.0 GHz can be purchased for around $300. Then get the SuperMicro H8SGL motherboard for also around $300. The only question to be answered is how well a high-end video card will perform when the slot is only wired for PCIe x8

The 8-core uses the same G34 socket as the 12-core, and AMD is planning to use the same socket with their offerings in 2011 so an upgrade path should exist for awhile.

I need to take a long, hard look at this. My existing Core 2 Quad is being taxed lately trying to 5-box, and I'd love to be able to stretch into 8 or more cores...

[universal]

if it's pcie 2.0 x8 then it's the same as pcie 1.0 x16. iirc the performance loss is between 0-5% :-)

it might be different with multiboxing, when your card runs out of memory faster, and needs to transfer a lot more, though that's really just speculation.

[Trick]

That board does indeed support PCIe 2.0.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Although the single cpu is nice I think that with the duel cpu boards with their 16 dimms you can use 2G ram sticks and get 32 gig and get the "holy grail" of MBing of putting the whole wow folder in ram with 32G.

$385 for a 16 Dimm board but E-ATX form factor so might need a new case.

http://www.8anet.com/ShowProduct.aspx?pid=7944


Well 2G chips are like $45 each and a 4G ddr3 is like $130

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-HYNIX-MEMORY...item4a9fe6906b


Well I think overall the duel cpu board is best cause at the end of the day if you decide to upgrade you just toss in another cpu lol ...

[Trick]

Nice thought, but I doubt it will work like you have planned.

For starters, AMD Opteron normally requires that all processors be present in the motherboard. So unless that has changed, you can't simply leave a socket empty.

Second, AMD has their memory controller built into the processor, and each processor normally manages its own bank of RAM. So even if you could leave one socket empty, chances are that you couldn't put any RAM into slots managed by the missing 2nd processor. The limit appears to be 16GB of unregistered RAM per proc, or 128GB of Registered ECC per proc.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Yur mostly right. Oh well ....

http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/mo...-H8DGU(-F).pdf

Memory Population for Optimal Performance
-For a Motherboard with One CPU (CPU1) Installed

# DIMMS CPU Branch 0 Branch 1 Branch 2 Branch 3
2 DIMMs CPU1 P1-1A P1-2A
4 DIMMs CPU1 P1-1A P1-2A P1-3A P1-4A
8 DIMMs CPU1 P1-1A P1-1B P1-2A P1-2B P1-3A P1-3B P1-4A P1-4B
Memory Population for Optimal Performance
-For a Motherboard with Two CPUs (CPU1 & CPU2) Installed
# DIMMS CPU Branch 0 Branch 1 Branch 2 Branch 3
4 DIMMs CPU1 P1-1A P1-2A
CPU2 P2-1A P2-2A
8 DIMMs CPU1 P1-1A P1-2A P1-3A P1-4A
CPU2 P2-1A P2-2A P2-3A P2-4A
16 DIMMs CPU1 P1-1A P1-1B P1-2A P1-2B P1-3A P1-3B P1-4A P1-4B

CPU2 P2-1A P2-1B P2-2A P2-2B P2-3A P2-3B P2-4A P2-4B