For a time now, Intel's Nehalem has lead the way with many end-users buying this superb technology.  But, WHOW.  With the claimed new additional features and extra physical cores, incorporating some significant power savings from the 45nm process could AMD just have snuck in the door with their new CPU's to draw back some of the workstation marketplace share.  Well we will have to wait and see over the coming few pages.

There has been significant hype of how the new SIX-Core beast is to perform, previous showings of Opterons in workstation systems have been good.   But, Intel always seemed to have that edge in performance, could this be the turning point in evolution?  On paper, it would appear so.  Though these are points to be readily addressed within the conclusions.

This new Opteron family processor has all six cores fully integrated on-die utilising AMD's Direct Connect architecture.    Each core has its own L1, L2 cache with all sharing common L3 6MB cache.    Power is a big priority and AMD claims the new processors not only have the same power/thermal envelope as the quad-core Opterons but offer up to a 50 per cent performance improvement.   In the meantime we see 5 new SIX-Core CPU's from AMD

Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor Product Specifications Summerised

Cache Size - Total Cache: 9.9MB
L1 Cache: 64KB (Data) + 64KB (Instruction) per core
L2 Cache: 512KB per core
L3 Cache: 6144MB

Process Technology - 45-nanometer SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
HyperTransport™ Technology Links - Three 16-bit/16-bit links @ up to 4.8GT/s for Socket F (1207)
Memory Integrated DDR2 memory controller-up to 12.8 GB/s memory bandwidth per CPU for Socket F (1207)
Types of Memory Registered ECC DDR2-533, DDR2-667, DDR2-800 for Socket F (1207)
Die Size - 258mm 2
Packaging - Socket F (1207) - 1207-pin organic Land Grid Array (LGA)

Therefore with the introduction completed, lets have a little look at what the official line is from AMD on these new CPU's.

Six-Core AMD Opteron processors: Top-line Performance that's bottom-line efficient
Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor-based servers give you the performance efficiency to handle real world workloads, with superior value and energy efficiency at every price point. Unlike competitive products focused on raw performance, AMD technology-based servers deliver one platform to support the top-line demands of your business with a total cost advantage you can take right to the bottom-line.

END USER BENEFITS

OPTIMAL BALANCE OF PRICE/PERFORMANCE, ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND TIME TO BENEFIT

1.    Energy Efficient – technology that enables new levels of power efficiency to help reduce energy consumption
2.    Price/Performance – performance that matters to efficiently drive business critical applications at a reasonable 
    cost
3.    Time to Benefit – common socket approach allows fast path to productivity with minimized disruption to IT
    infrastructure

VIRTUALIZATION INNOVATION GIVES USERS SUPERIOR VALUE FROM THEIR COMPUTING RESOURCES.

1.    Architectural features that support optimized virtualized workloads like email, web serving and database
2.    Flexibility – to manage, load, balance and support life migration of virtual machines across five generations of
    AMD Opteron™ processor-based systems
3.    Price/Performance – delivers the performance you need to run cost effective virtual machines.

PRODUCT FEATURES HYPERTRANSPORT™

•  TECHNOLOGY ASSIST [HT ASSIST] – Increases HyperTransport™ technology efficiency by reducing probe  
   traffic and resolving probe issues more quickly.

• AMD-V™ WITH RAPID VIRTUALIZATION INDEXING silicon-based feature that improves virtualization performance, enabling more virtual machines to run per server.

• AMD WIDE FLOATING POINT ACCELERATOR for significantly improved performance on HPC, scientific and workstation applications.

• AMD-P Power Savings Features:
  o    ENHANCED AMD POWERNOW!™ TECHNOLOGY works with the operating system to provide performance on-demand capabilities for precise power management, processor power savings and low TCO.
  o    INDEPENDENT DYNAMIC CORE TECHNOLOGY can vary clock frequency per core based on workload to help reduce power consumption and thermal output.
  o    AMD COOLCORE™ TECHNOLOGY automatically turns off parts of the processor core when they are not in use offering reduced processor power consumption.
  o    AMD SMART FETCH TECHNOLOGY allows unused cores to enter a deeper sleep state and draw less power, reducing CPU power consumption.
  o    AMD POWERCAP MANAGER: Allows the user to lock in p-states to cap off power consumption for added power efficiency.
  o    AMD BALANCED SMART CACHE offers better support for multi-threaded environments with a highly efficient cache structure that helps reduce the latency of accessing main memory.
  o    AMD MEMORY OPTIMIZER TECHNOLOGY increases memory throughput* and supports memory-intensive applications.
  o    DUAL DYNAMIC POWER MANAGEMENT™ separately powered memory controller and processor core allows for greater application performance while providing more opportunities to save system power with AMD PowerNow!™ technology.

*Compared to Second-Generation AMD Opteron™ processors.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - The System
Page 3 - System Set-Up and Benchmark/Applications Used
Page 4 - Sandra 2009 SP2
Page 5 - ATTO Benchmark and Everest Ultimate 5.01
Page 6 - POV Ray 3.72 Beta and Cinebench 10 - 64 Bit Tests
Page 7 - 3DS Max 2009 Scenes
Page 8 - SPECviewperf® 10.0 and SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
Page 9 - Conclusions
Page 10 - Bonus Section (Shanghai 2.7GHz Results)