HP ships workstations with dual six-core Opterons
updated 08:45 am EDT, Wed July 1, 2009
HP xw9400 6-Core Opteron
HP today stepped up the power of its xw9400 workstations with the addition of AMD's six-core Opteron 2400 series to the mix. Also nicknamed Istanbul, the chips give a system as many as 12 cores. HP maintains AMD's view that the chips offer about 34 percent more performance per watt when compared to earlier quad-cores, which often use the same amount of energy.
Which Opterons are being used isn't mentioned, but clock speeds for the Opteron 2400 line range from 2.2GHz to 2.6GHz. The systems can also be outfitted with a high-end FirePro V7750 workstation-class graphics card from AMD. No specific pricing is available for a six- or 12-core xw9400 model, though HP says that the workstation line will start from $1,899.
The move gives AMD a minor edge over Intel, which launched six-core Xeons earlier but typically reserves them for high-end servers due to their high power consumption relative to quad-core equivalents.
