Advanced Micro Devices on Monday said that its highly-anticipated AMD Opteron processors with eight and twelve cores are finally available on the market. The new chips will allow AMD to tangibly boost its market share and will also make 4-way servers to become more affordable.

“As AMD has done before, we are again redefining the server market based on current customer requirements. The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform signals a new era of server value, significantly disrupts today’s server economics and provides the performance-per-watt, value and consistency customers demand for their real-world data center workloads,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager of AMD’s server and embedded divisions.

AMD Opteron “Magny-Cours” processors with eight or twelve cores are the first chips designed  for the AMD G34 “Maranello” platform for Opteron processors 6000-series with quad-channel DDR3 memory interface, 2 or 4 CPU sockets, up to 12 memory modules per socket and some server and enterprise-specific functionality. Magny-Cours microprocessors feature two six-core or quad-core dies on one piece of substrate.

Maranello is AMD’s first platform in almost a decade that is based on the company’s own chipset. AMD 5600-series chipset features I/O virtualization capability, HyperTransport 3.0 technology and PCI Express 2.0. The new AMD Opteron platform is chipset- and socket- compatible between 2P and 4P and will be compatible with the planned processors based on the next-generation AMD server processor core, code-named “Bulldozer”.

AMD also stresses that the new Maranello platform removes the so-called “4P tax”, since the same processors can be used in both 2-way and 4-way designs, and 4P-capable processors are now the same price as 2P-capable processors.

Sunnyvale, California-based AMD hopes that its next-generation servers will offer great performance-per-watt despite of higher power consumption of twelve-core and eight-core chips thanks to increased amount of cores and other innovations of the new-generation platforms. In particular, the new processors will have HyperTransport bus speed increased to 6.4GT/s, which will increase performance scalability, as well as Cool Speed and C1E technologies to reduce power consumption.

Leading OEMs including HP, Dell, Acer Group, Cray, and SGI are introducing new systems based on this highly scalable and reliable platform. Pricing of AMD Opteron 6000-series microprocessors varies from $266 to $1386 depending on the model.

Tags: AMD, Opteron, Magny-Cours, 45nm, Maranello