45nm Istanbul has six cores comparatively to Shanghai’s four cores and 6 MB of L3 cache. New processor fits into a Socket-F style mainboard to provide easy upgrade for existing Socket-F systems without the need to change major components or perform software upgrades/changes. Istambul supports DDR2 RAM and could be used in 2, 4 and 8-processors configurations.

Istambul processors provide significant performance increase over Shanghai at the same clock rate. For example in Stream based benchmarks Shanghai system configured with 16-cores produced a throughput in the range of 25,000 MB/sec. while the 24-core Istanbul configuration produced about 42,000 MB/sec. This gain in performance is attribued to an optimised inner architecture of the Istambul.

AMD is currently planning a full lineup of six-core Opterons based on Istanbul including low-power HE versions and high-performance SE models, all within customary Opteron power and thermal envelopes.

Six-core Istambul Opteron will be available for ordering in the second half of this year through Asbis B2B Marketplace across the region of Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Opteron Shanghai available immediately.