AMD Opteron 6200 chips boast 16 cores

computerworlduk.com

24 points·EdwardQ··10 comments

Dell have a server with the 6200 series integrated, here's a review if your interested? http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/sme-servers/2011/11/14/dell-p...

Gaming?

Running the WoW servers, maybe.

No. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd-...

This is being marketed as a "server" chip... The only application I can see this doing well in would be low-energy markets. But even then I doubt it will be successful with all the advancements in ARM.

ARM isn't an x86 chip.

ARM chips aren't that great at floating point, which is what most scientific computing heavily uses.

This is why RISC held on for so long in the '90s - x86 traditionally was pretty bad at floating point.

Then again, these AMD chips likely share one FPU between each core pair, so performance is yet to be determined.

They probably need high-optimization vectorizing, parallelizing compilers too. Not sure how many of those there are for ARM.

ARM is still a non-issue in the server market. Maybe in a couple of years, but today there are remarkably few applications of it.

Say what?

It's an 85-140W thermal envelope chip, with 16 very fast cores (iirc, AMD vs. Intel TDP). That's in a completely different planet to a 1W sluggish(ish) ARM core.

Or, slightly more to the point: Oak ridge is making a supercomputer using these chips. These are designed to be very fast. They are not designed to be low energy in the ARM sense of the word.

These are, iirc. designed to be used in visualised server (cloud) and other high compute environments.

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